VALR showcases exciting new features
VALR has kicked off 2023 with a bang, with the announcement of two exciting new product features.
Shared accounts and spot margin were both showcased at an event co-hosted by CV Labs Africa in Cape Town last week.
While the spot margin functionality is in the early stages of being rolled out, shared account access is now available to all VALR users, free of charge.
“We’re excited about the possibilities that are available to VALR and our friends building crypto businesses around the world to forever improve traditional financial markets,” VALR COO Gianluca Sacco told guests gathered at Workshop 17.
VALR corporate clients are already experiencing the benefits of the new offerings.
Krpt.io’s Jonathan Els, one of the speakers at the event, explained that the VALR API and sub-account features were the only way they were able to automate their flow and administration process on a local exchange.
“For this reason we’ve built tightly on top of VALR and the quality of the technology and APIs is excellent.”
What Shared Accounts means for VALR users
VALR’s new shared account functionality allows an organisation (vs an individual) to access and manage a single account in a secure way.
Additionally, users need the ability to reduce internal risks through commonplace financial governance features such as audit trails, rights access and multi-party authentication.
Explaining the decision to make governance features available to individuals as well as companies, Head of Growth Blake Player said, “What if someone would like to help manage a portfolio of crypto in their parents name? They could simply get trade access to that account. Or what if you had a financial advisor or accountant that you wanted to provide visibility of your holdings and trade activity to? We’d prefer you to be able to do this without sharing your passwords. Hence, we’ve given this to everyone, free of charge.”
Thanks to these new governance features, VALR users are now able to:
- Add guests to their account or sub-account with certain permissions: view only or trade and view.
- Set up sub-accounts with completely segregated balances and trade histories for a variety of uses, such as separating strategies, or accounting for end clients (or in combination with shared access, even separate individual traders)
Spot margin in beta testing
Sacco revealed that VALR had recently opened up its spot margin beta testing programme to qualified corporate customers on request.
“This is a huge moment for us, as we have been building and testing our proprietary margin trading and liquidations engine for over a year,” he explained.
“We want to make sure that the product is reliable and highly performant, even under strain, so we have taken our time in ironing out all the creases and testing thoroughly internally before making this available to customers.”
Developing a spot margin product is an important part of VALR’s innovation and growth pipeline.
As Sacco pointed out, “This type of facility is a critical tool for traders in all markets (not only in crypto) and it certainly isn’t going away anytime soon. Traders need this for capital management, risk management as well as to effectively take advantage of arbitrage opportunities in markets.”
As a start, spot margin functionality will be available only to VALR’s business customers who meet certain qualifying criteria in terms of revenue and capital, to satisfy regulatory requirements.
As the product is still in the early stages of roll out, there are some initial restrictions.
These are:
- Spot margin trading is only initially available for VALR’s Bitcoin-Rand order bookLeverage will remain conservative and will only be available up to 2x, measured as debt that can be borrowed against net account equity
- Collateral assets include bitcoin and rand only for the time being
Each of these restrictions will be adjusted according to regulatory requirements and risk management thresholds.
VALR intends to expand this offering to as many qualified customers as possible in the future and will be in touch with customers once this is possible.
Overall, Sacco told guests, “VALR’s spot margin engine will offer a simple, safe and importantly, compliant manner for our customers to access debt in order to trade with leverage on our spot order books.”
Shared accounts and spot margin are part of an ambitious product pipeline for VALR as Africa’s biggest exchange eyes global opportunities.
Reflecting on the successful product reveal, Sacco adds, “We’re looking forward to serving our customers even more effectively in 2023 and beyond. These are features that will appeal to our most active traders, and we have plans to roll out more advanced products in the future. Watch this space!”
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