By
Steve Muchoki
April 25th, 2024
CBOE stops trading Bitcoin futures starting from June 19, while CME has recently enjoyed a record high volume of 33,700 contracts for cryptocurrency derivatives.
Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the world’s largest options market, will reportedly settle the last Bitcoin futures contract on June 19. With the expiration of the last contract, the trading of cryptocurrency derivatives will be officially closed, with no more futures to follow on the exchange.
CBOE was the first American exchange to list Bitcoin futures. The exchange announced the launch of Bitcoin futures a year and a half ago, when Chris Concannon, the then-President and Chief Operating Officer of Cboe Global Markets, claimed the derivatives to be real game changers set to revolutionize the traditional sphere of finance and boost cryptocurrency acceptance:
“Over the next 10 years we believe that the cryptocurrency market will explode in terms of the assets that they touch, the currencies that they involve.”
The closure of CBOE Bitcoin futures market was announced in March 2019. Then the company stated:
“CFE is not adding a Cboe Bitcoin (USD) (“XBT”) futures contract for trading in March 2019. CFE is assessing its approach with respect to how it plans to continue to offer digital asset derivatives for trading. While it considers its next steps, CFE does not currently intend to list additional XBT futures contracts for trading.”
According to the recent emailed comment by the spokeswoman, Suzanne Cosgrove, the exchange still doesn’t plan to add new Bitcoin futures contracts:
“CBOE is assessing its approach with respect to how it plans to continue to offer digital asset derivatives for trading, but we have nothing new to announce at this time.”
Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) followed CBOE in listing Bitcoin futures a year and a half ago. For now, CME is not going to follow the example of CBOE in its intention to close trading cryptocurrency derivatives. On the opposite, the exchange has recently observed much greater success than ever settling $90 million contracts, which exceeds CBOE’s daily volume. Moreover, on May 13, CME Group reached a record high volume of 33,700 contracts for Bitcoin, processing more than a billion dollars in a single day.
The reason of such unexpected CME’s advantage over CBOE can be CME’s method of asset pricing. While CBOE was relying only on Gemini listing, CME was collecting the data from several marketplaces, which resulted in the growing confidence of traders in the trustworthiness of the exchange.