Delta Exchange

Delta Exchange is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange that lets traders take positions on crypto price movements through futures, options and perpetual contracts without holding the underlying assets. Its India platform is built around INR workflows: users deposit and withdraw Indian rupees directly from a bank account, post margin and realise profit and loss in INR, and complete KYC using Aadhaar and PAN. Contract sizes are small (BTC contracts at roughly Rs 5,000 and ETH contracts at roughly Rs 2,500), with a stated minimum trading amount of ₹100 and support for fractional Bitcoin exposure. The exchange offers daily, weekly and monthly expiries, deep OTM/ITM strikes, and a margining scheme that allows offsetting across basket orders.

Beyond crypto, the platform lists futures and options on tokenized real-world assets, including gold (XAUT, PAXG), silver (SLVON) and US equities such as Tesla, Google and Nvidia, alongside spot trading in BTC and ETH. Trading tools include a strategy builder for multi-leg futures and options structures, an options analytics dashboard, demo trading with virtual funds, TradingView chart integration, an algo marketplace of ready-made strategies, trading bots driven by external signals, and downloadable historical tick-by-tick data. Free REST APIs, published SDKs and an official MCP server support algorithmic and quantitative traders; the company also maintains a public GitHub organization with trading bots, Python and Node clients, and API documentation tooling.

The company describes its infrastructure as a low-latency matching and order management stack with dedicated risk, margin and liquidation engines and real-time market data, operated for both retail and institutional participants. Account security features cited include two-factor authentication and multilevel encryption.

Founding story

Delta Exchange was founded in 2018 by Pankaj Balani, Jitender Tokas and Saurabh Goyal, whose backgrounds span financial markets, derivatives trading, product and engineering at firms including Citigroup, UBS and Hotstar. Balani, an IIT Delhi graduate with an MBA from the Indian School of Business, is a UBS alum with experience in derivatives, quantitative finance and Asian equity markets and previously helped build an Indian e-commerce business. Tokas, CBO, was a stock analyst at Citigroup in India and an institutional investor at GIC in Singapore, and is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, the National University of Singapore and the Indian School of Business. Goyal, CTO, previously co-founded Housing.com and TinyOwl and served as Director of Engineering at Hotstar, and studied computer science and engineering at IIT Bombay.

Business model

Delta Exchange operates an exchange venue and earns trading fees on the contracts traded on it. Futures are charged a 0.05% taker fee and 0.02% maker fee; options are charged 0.010% of notional value, capped at 3.5% of the option premium; spot buy orders are free while sell orders cost 0.1%. All fees are stated to include 18% GST.

Transaction-based fees on futures, options and spot trading, differentiated by maker/taker role and product type.

Traction

At the India launch the company reported monthly transaction volume of USD 17 billion, 160% year-on-year growth, over 100,000 Indian users onboarded during the beta, and peak daily trading volume of USD 300 million within two months of the beta launch.

Latest developments

The product line has broadened to include spot trading in BTC and ETH with INR deposits and withdrawals, plus futures and options on tokenized real-world assets including Tether Gold, PAX Gold, tokenized silver and US equities. The company has published an official Delta Exchange MCP server and an AI-assisted API Copilot for algorithmic traders, and maintains an algo marketplace and TradingView-linked trading bots.