Cryptocurrency live: Bitcoin Futures Have Been Successful
From the perspective of a trader, this might seem like a good thing. The futures market is more liquid and has more volume than any other cryptocurrency exchange in the world. But there are some traders who believe that the success of bitcoin futures is not necessarily good for the crypto community at large.
“If you’re an institutional investor, you want to trade your bitcoins on a regulated exchange, so you know what kind of compliance you have,” said Michael Moro, CEO of Genesis Global Trading. “The fact that CME and CBOE provide that is fantastic.”
But there are some who believe that bitcoin will eventually find its way back to the $20,000 mark it hit just last year. If that happens, then the launch of bitcoin futures could be a positive thing for the market as a whole.
“I think it’s very positive,” said Spencer Bogart, managing director at Blockchain Capital. “There are many people that are waiting for more liquidity before they enter this market.”
Bitcoin futures have been successful, according to Scott Nations, president of NationsShares.
A futures contract allows an investor to buy or sell an asset (such as Bitcoin) at a set price and date in the future. It can be used as a way to hedge risk or speculate on the future price of an asset.
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) launched Bitcoin futures trading on Sunday night, while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) will begin trading its Bitcoin futures later this month.
Bitcoin is notoriously volatile, making it a riskier investment than traditional assets such as shares and bonds. According to Coinmarketcap, the cryptocurrency has seen some wild swings in value over recent months. In December of last year, one Bitcoin was worth $20,000 – today it is worth $14,500 at the time of writing. However, it was worth just $1,000 at the start of 2017.
Nations said that he believes that the latest futures contracts will “go off without a hitch” because they are cash settled rather than physically settled. This means that investors will not actually receive any Bitcoin if they win their bet on the future price: instead they get paid out in cash.
According to Nations: “There’s also
The second wave of bitcoin futures have been successful – with a 4% rise in the price of the cryptocurrency at their launch.
The new futures, from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), were launched on Sunday evening.
Futures are a type of financial contract that allow investors to place bets on how much a commodity will be worth at a later date.
They were first launched in December by CME’s rival, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE).
At their launch, there was a 10% rise in the price of bitcoin, which many put down to speculation about what would happen when markets opened. However, some analysts suggested that it was largely down to technical problems with CBOE’s website on its first day of trading.
The latest announcement came as South Korea announced that it was considering banning cryptocurrency trading.
The country’s justice minister said banning trading was still an option, despite a previous announcement that it was preparing a bill to ban exchanges.
The first exchange-traded bitcoin futures contracts have been successful, and the CBOE has already announced that it will begin trading the second contract on February 23.
The new futures will be based on the Cboe Gemini Bitcoin auction price from 4 p.m. ET to 5 p.m. ET each trading day and will be cash-settled, like the previous contract, which was launched in December.
The CBOE said that the new contract would be “available for trading beginning at 6 p.m. EST Sunday, February 25 for a trade date of Monday, February 26” and that it expected to “continue to assess demand for bitcoin futures and make plans accordingly” in terms of when it would launch additional futures contracts.
Despite the hype surrounding the bitcoin futures market, many investors and analysts still remained skeptical at the success of the new market. When it launched, critics believed that the futures market would push bitcoin’s price down due to its high volatility and low liquidity.
However, as Cointelegraph reported at the end of December 2017, bitcoin had experienced a strong and steady performance in the past week, recovering from below $14,000 to $17,000 by December 25. More importantly, the launch of bitcoin futures allowed more institutional investors to enter the cryptocurrency market with a regulated platform that granted them with more security and stability.
Lately, large-scale retail traders have also started to demonstrate an interest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. According to data provided by Kraken exchange, a large portion of retail investors who have been trading on Kraken recently have been trading in US dollars and euros.
Bitcoin futures are finally here.
A few weeks ago, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) launched a new futures contract that tracks Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. The launch of CBOE Bitcoin futures was a huge milestone for the cryptocurrency market.
It marked the first time a major regulated financial institution has offered an investment product based on Bitcoin. And this came just days after CME Group said it would launch its own Bitcoin futures contract in mid-December, which paves the way for more traditional investors to get exposure to Bitcoin.
This development is important because it means that institutional investors will soon be able to invest in Bitcoin without having to buy digital coins directly. If you’re an institutional investor that has been hesitant about investing in cryptocurrencies, buying Bitcoin futures contracts will give you indirect exposure to Bitcoin without having to deal with some of the headaches associated with buying and storing digital tokens.
Now we’re starting to see data that shows that the introduction of these new instruments has been a big win for both investors and exchanges.
According to data from CryptoCompare, trading volume on CBOE’s new Bitcoin futures contract jumped as high as 4,127 contracts on Tuesday morning, suggesting that demand for this type of product is strong among traders. Each contract represents
A few days ago CBOE Global Markets Inc. and CME Group Inc. started the trading of Bitcoin Futures. This was seen as a huge step forward for the cryptocurrency industry, which has been growing at a rapid pace over the last couple of years.
The start of Bitcoin Futures trading was not free from controversy. The day after launch, CBOE’s website crashed due to high traffic and both exchanges had to halt trading for two minutes in order to stabilize the price of Bitcoin contracts. These are not a surprise given that they were some of the most anticipated financial instruments in recent times.
The first week of trading was very positive for Bitcoin Futures, with over $1 billion worth of contracts traded on CBOE’s market alone and an average daily volume of $100 million dollars on CME’s platform. This is relatively low when compared with other financial instruments, but it is understandable since these are new markets that are still trying to stablish themselves.