Is the future not likely to be impacted the same way if the asset if manipulated? Several of the other comments on this thread mention that the future appears to be less likely to be manipulated.
Intuitively I’d think they are wildly similar, or correlated, but I’m sure I don’t know enough here to understand why I’m wrong.
> Intuitively I’d think they are wildly similar, or correlated
The thing is that if you are willing to bet on the price movement of a token, futures are a much more cost and capital efficient way to do so.
- Its more capital efficient because you can leverage futures. Say you want an exposure of $1000 on the price of BTC and only have access to a spot market. You would need to actually buy $1000 worth of BTC, or use margin (a loan basically, but the interests are prohibitive). With futures, you would just need to maintain the required margin amount depending on your preferred leverage, so you could get that $1000 BTC exposure with a post of $100. For the same exposure of $1000, futures allows you to use less capital, or conversely with the same capital, you can have more exposure with futures.
- Trading fees are much lower on futures, since this is mainly a virtual, exchange-owned instrument. There is often no actual movement of the underlying when trading futures, especially if everything is settled in cash. Futures trading fees are often significantly lower than spot.
These advantages of futures often lead them to have _much_ more liquidity than the actual spot market, which in turn means they are much more stable.
What we see often on small marketcap coins is that the ownership of tokens is opaque. Regularly, some whales (sometimes even unknowingly) dump huge amounts of the coin on the spot market, which leads to flash crashes until market makers can provide back some liquidity. This is very unlikely to happen on futures, since the liquidity is so much higher, dumping some millions worth in the market wouldn't dry out the book all that dramatically.
I did not check numbers recently, but just to give you a rough idea, the daily traded amount on uniswap (spot, decentralized) should be around $1B/day, Binance spot should be around $10B/day, and Binance perpetual futures around $40B/day.
