Helena Izotova
CME Group, the world’s biggest operator of futures exchanges, has announced Bitcoin futures, the world’s first and most popular cryptocurrency to date. The information was first made public by The Financial Times.
Terrence Daffy, CEO of CME Group, said that given the fact that more people are getting interested in digital currencies, they decided to introduce Bitcoin futures. CME Group announced the launch of those BTC futures at some point in Q4 2017 after the regulator approves the new derivative.
According to The Financial Times, this clearly indicates that digital currencies are getting recognized by the financial world as they keep on getting popular all over the world. This is not the first operator willing to launch Bitcoin derivatives. In August 2017, CBOE Global Markets, America’s biggest option operator, also announced an intension to launch Bitcoin options. The operator is going to obtain the quoting from Gemini Trust, a cryptocurrency exchange. As for the clearing of contracts, most probably this is going to be Options Clearing Corporation (OCC). By now, the company still hasn’t got an approval to work with cryptocurrencies.
As for CME Group, they are going to value those futures based on their own technology – CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate, which was launched 12 months ago.
According to the experts working for NordFX, the news about CME Group's plans to launch Bitcoin futures pushed BTC 5,2% higher at a time. Since the start of the year, Bitcoin has already gone up in value by more than 50%.
Helena Izotova
