CME Group, the world’s largest traders of futures exchange and options has set a date to start trading BTC futures starting December 18th. While CBOE Futures Exchange has not yet provided a date yet.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have agreed to allow CME group and CBOE to trade bitcoin futures. This makes these exchanges to be the first traditional exchanges to launch bitcoin financial contracts which will eventually lead to a lot of regulatory scrutiny. While the regulators are not certain about bitcoin, these Wall Street companies have taken a leap to make it available for larger investors.
The exchanges will provide lower margin requirements between 35 and 45 percentages to guard against the volatility. They also enter to a sharing agreements and send CFTC data on settlement process so that regulator can keep a watch on the transactions.
“We expect that the futures exchanges, through information sharing agreements, will be monitoring the trading activity on the relevant cash platforms for potential impacts on the futures contracts’ price discovery process, including potential market manipulation and market dislocations due to flash rallies and crashes, and trading outages” he said by CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo
Nasdaq has also announced to launch early 2018 as reported by Reuters earlier this week.
