Spectre.AI is a decentralized binary trading platform operating via Ethereum blockchain. Its founders call it a speculative tokenized trading exchange. The main advantages of this approach to building a fair binary options broker is the removal of the conflict of interest:
- Traders operating via exchange trade against each other, so the broker is not interested in traders’ losses.
- Even when trading is performed against the “house”, deposits and withdrawals are handled by the blockchain’s smart contract, so the broker cannot refuse any withdrawals.
Background
Spectre.AI was announced in September 2017 with a private presale of its tokens performed in October-November and the public ICO process done in November-December same year. The alpha version of the trading platform has been also available since September 2017. In 2018, the platform has been launched into a normal operating mode with real accounts for binary option trading and multiple features.
Currently, there are two types of Spectre.AI tokens available to investors – SXDT and SXUT. While SXDT tokens are not very interesting to common traders as they are simple dividend tokens, the SXUT can be useful to binary traders. SXUT are utility tokens; owning them provides benefits inside the trading platform.
Spectre Exchange Utility Tokens (SXUT)
With SXUT, traders can get some viable perks, making it similar to traditional binary option bonuses or account tiers but provided in a much fairer fashion.
Additional education:
- Financial Trading Course (Smart Options & FX)
- Crypto Currency Course
Trading features:
- Up to 10% higher payouts
- Up to 300 basis points lower spread (CFDs)
- +10 FX pairs unlock
- +10 cryptocurrency pairs unlock
- ICO alt-coins unlock
- +10 equities unlock
- +10 ETFs unlock
- +10 bonds unlock
- Jumbo trade size unlock
- Trader-defined expiry time in minutes
- Live chat support
Deposit & Withdrawal
Spectre.AI allows traders to work both with deposits and without deposits. When trading without deposits, the binary option contracts are bought directly from the trader’s Ethereum wallet. When trading with a deposit to the exchange, the funds are stored in a special escrow wallet operated by a smart contract – the exchange personnel cannot steal your funds, and you can withdraw them in an automatic manner. This completely eliminates the third-party risk.
The minimum trade size is $10 (in ETH equivalent). The minimum deposit size when transferring funds into the exchange’s escrow wallet is 0.1 ETH.
Note: operating with deposit offers higher binary option payout rates compared to trading directly from the wallet.
Trading Platform
The current trading platform looks good but not excellent. It has charts, trading panel, trading ideas panel, current news, news calendar, trading session indicator, basic portfolio analysis, list of trading instruments, list of your trades, a ticker line with recent trades (by people who decided to share their trades), and that is basically it. A lot of features are planned, including connectivity with MetaTrader 4 platform.
Overall, the platform is easy-to-use and does not look much different from what is staple with the traditional binary options brokers. Each panel has a small question icon to give you a quick explanation of its function.
Markets
Spectre.AI has huge plans regarding the offered trading instruments and the range of markets for traders to deal in. However, currently, Spectre.AI offers only binary options (smart options) in 30 Forex pairs (including gold and silver), and 19 cryptocurrency pairs (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dash, Monero, and Ripple).
The current plans include the launch of the following trading assets before the end of 2018: 10 commodities, 500 cryptocurrencies, 1000+ stocks, 1000+ bonds, 10+ ETfs, 10+ indices.
The option types included High/Low (traditional calls and puts), Barrier, Knock-in-Knock-out (KIKO), Ladders, and Reverse Futures.
Special Features
Risk Management
One of the most interesting features offered by Spectre.AI is the risk-management, which lets you limit your own risk by applying a range of settings. The trading platform will use the Early Warning Engine to lock you out of trading if you lose too much:
As you can see, the number of parameters to regulate your own risk profile is pretty big. You can set daily stop-loss, daily win-stop, stop-out time, streak count and streak timeout, maximum allocation per trade, maximum number of trades, minimum payout rate, and maximum drawdown per day/week/month.
This is an invaluable tool against overtrading, revenge trading, and other behavior traits that can be very dangerous to binary option traders.
Trade Ideas
Traders may choose to receive automated trade ideas generated by the platform. Currently, there are 11 different trade idea types and you can turn them on and off individually:
- Battleground
- Breakout
- Dead Cat Bounce
- Humming Bird
- Macro Channel Surfer
- Macro Waterfall
- Micro Channel Surfer
- Micro Waterfall
- Micro-Xtreme
- Psyres
- Recoil
You are not obliged to act on any of the generated trade ideas. You can decide on your own whether to trade it at all and, if so, how to trade it.
Limitations
The platform is clearly still under development with the plans for most capabilities launch spanning deep into 2019. Despite this, it has some limitations that are not connected with the platform being in development.
The most notable restriction is availability in countries. Unfortunately, Spectre.AI is not available to the residents of the USA, Costa Rica, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Iran, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, Syria, Somalia, North Korea, and Yemen.
Another important restriction is that no market is available for trading on weekends – even cryptocurrencies! The platform blames low liquidity on Saturday and Sunday.
Conclusion
Spectre.AI is very different from your average run-of-the-mill-binary binary broker. It has its notable features and attractive advantages. It also lacks some of the deal-killer disadvantages of traditional brokers. Nevertheless, the platform is still pretty young, making it look rather immature compared to some decade-old brokers in the industry. The technology behind Spectre.AI is promising but requires a lot of improvements. If the team continues their hard work on the platform’s original objectives, this will undoubtedly make Spectre.AI one of the worthiest binary option outlets.