Crypto exchanges API changes update: February/March 2021

Based on trades we observe, most of the work in the infrastructure and API development by digital asset exchanges lies in the area of derivatives and margin trading.  

Binance 

Binance introduced several new API end-points to manage BUSD loans. 

Sub-accounts also got a new boost with these calls:

• Create a virtual sub-account: /sapi/v1/sub-account/virtualSubAccount
• Get a list of all sub-accounts: /sapi/v1/sub-account/list
• Enable BLTV for sub-account: /sapi/v1/sub-account/blvt/enable

OKEx

OKEx’s push towards a unified account structure is a great development that turned into a small technological drama. 

Unified Accounts allow clients to use the same API keys and balances to trade on spot and derivative markets. In theory, it makes traders’ lives easier so they don’t have to transfer assets back and forth from wallet to wallet. From anintegration standpoint, it’s a very practical move because with V5 API we should care only about a single API key pair and connectivity. 

In reality, this transition turned into a small mess – V3 and V5 keys were incompatible, many integrations stopped working, and V3 API keys creation moved into manual mode with up to three days of waiting time. 

Huobi

On Feb 28, Huobi stopped legacy v1 WebSockets. Shiny v2 with features such as client’s assigned order id, extended account, order, and balance update channels are waiting for integrators to pick it. 

BitMEX

Disregard all advances in technologies, people still tend to make human-related errors. Fat Finger is a well-known but still often occurring situation. It does not spare anyone – crypto traders or respectful institutional players such as Citigroup (search for the recent $900M payout of Revlon debt).

BitMEX is the place where traders make a fortune or become broke in a blink of an eye. In February, BitMEX introduced Fat Finger protection:

• All market orders with price deviation +/- 5% from TOB will be rejected 
• All limit orders with price deviation +/- 5% from TOB will be rejected. E.g. if you want to place a BUY order above the current best ask plus 5%, the system will consider it as an error.