CME Group, the Chicago-located exchange, has recorded a splash of interest from investors who are buying BTC derivatives at the start of 2019.
Good start of the year for CME
The company’s internal e-mail says that on February 19, the company made a new record by selling 18,338 futures contracts on BTC. That is equal to nearly 91,700 BTC or $360 mln.
In November 2018, the record set by the exchange was a little smaller, says the email:
“Q1 2019 is off to a strong start, ADV has improved to 4,630 contracts (23,150 equivalent bitcoin), up ~13% from Q4 2018 while [open interest] rose to 4,076 contracts, an improvement of 21.5% over Q4 2018.”
As for the customers, since the moment the exchange started working, it has had more than 2,000 accounts for trading BTC futures, belonging to 30 unique institutional clients. By the way, this category of clients has become more interested in the product.
Since November last year, CME has gotten over 40 new clients of this scale. They are also dubbed LOIHs (Large Open Interest Holders), that is, an institution that owns 25 futures on Bitcoin.
The BTC derivatives market
The BTC derivatives market is much wider than just CME. Since the time it first launched this product, other players have entered the business too. Among them are major exchanges, like OKEx, BitMEX, etc – these are the biggest players on the market at the moment.
Now this market includes not only futures but also crypto options and swaps, and the amount of players in the market keeps increasing.
Other crypto trading heavyweights intend to release their crypto derivatives exchanges in the US in 2019. Among them are Bakkt, SeedCX, and ErisX.
Bakkt plans to offer BTC derivatives, and SeedCX as well as ErisX will offer futures on several coins. Among those will probably be Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Binance reportedly is also considering a move to the crypto derivatives market.
Alex Dovbnya
Valeria Blokhina
