The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group), the largest futures exchange in the world, launched the trade in Bitcoin futures. Now investors can buy an urgent exchange contract for January, February, March, and June.
At the launch, the January futures price was $20,600. Within two hours, the price fell 11% to $18,300. In less than a day, 645 futures were sold at the CME exchange, and the total trading volume exceeded $60 million.
Earlier, Bitcoin futures trading were launched by Chicago-based CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) Global Markets. At the first opening, the contract for January was worth $15.4 thousand. After that, for several hours the price of January and February futures jumped by more than 25% - to $ 18.79 thousand and $ 19.14 thousand, reports Bloomberg.
The prices of competing contracts on CBOE and CME are close in value. However, their dynamics at some points shows a contradiction. The reason lies in a different basis for calculating the cost - CME futures prices are based on information provided by four crypto-exchanges (Bitstamp, GDAX, itBit, and Kraken), while CBOE prices are based only on the quotation shown by Gemini crypto exchange.
CME Group and CBOE Global Markets were among the first to initiate Bitcoin futures trading. Later, Nasdaq - one of the main stock exchanges in the US - also announced its intention to launch cryptocurrency futures contracts trading in the first half of 2018.
Now Bitcoin became available for large financial investors. The banks, pension funds, and other large financial structures will be able to buy an asset tied to the price of Bitcoin.
Interestingly, the launch of Bitcoin futures on CME led to a decline in price. On Monday, December 18, Coinmarketcap.com showed that BTC fell to $18.9 thousand.