South Korea’s biggest crypto exchange platform Bithumb has announced the introduction of leverage trading for both Bitcoin as well as Ether (ETH) on the global platform, Cointelegraph reports.

According to the exchange, the move was necessitated by a sudden increase in demand for crypto services owing to the ongoing global lock down. However, the new service comes just days following the biggest Bitcoin deleverage event so far.

The new margin trading from Bithumb comes less than a month following the historic March 12-13 crypto crash which saw crypto values of numerous cryptos decrease by over 50% in a span of two days.

According to a blog by Coinbase, data from Skew indicates that the market tumbling led to historical deleveraging from Bitcoin markets. The data indicated that approximately a combined $4 billion of open leveraged Bitcoin positions were available on various platforms such as Bitfinex, Deribit, OKEx, Huobi, FTX, Kraken, CME, BitMex as well as Bybit before the crashing of the markets. Following the crash, open leveraged position in the 11 platforms was less than $1 billion which was about 75% drop.

According to Bithumb’s press statement, although the world is experiencing an economic slowdown due to the prevailing lockdowns by the Covid-19 pandemic, the crypto sector has witnessed a surge in interest from all corners of the world.

Bithumb associates the rising interest in crypto to the huge number of individuals in search for alternative virtual assets to deal with the uncertainties.

Bithumb supports 115 crypto spot trading as well as token trading for 168 pairings. However, the platform only supports margin trading for only two pairings which include ETH/USDT as well as BTC/USDT. For the two pairings, the maximum leverage capped at 5X.

Meanwhile, the Korean giant exchange also revealed that it is now supporting crypto bought using Visa payments in form of United Arabs Emirates dirham as well as Indian rupees.

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