Bitcoin heads to bigger Wall Street stage as CME Group debuts futures

new york — The world’s biggest exchange is joining the Bitcoin revolution.

Bitcoin futures started trading on Sunday night at CME Group’s venue, a week after Chicago rival Cboe Global Markets introduced similar derivatives on the volatile cryptocurrency.

CME’s version could make a bigger splash because the company is a much bigger player in futures than Cboe, handling about 55 times more volume during the first nine months of 2017, according to the Futures Industry Association. Cboe has so far traded more than 10,000 contracts representing about $180 million in Bitcoin, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Many traders couldn’t access that contract because some brokers didn’t immediately offer them, said Garrett See, chief executive officer of crypto trading firm DV Chain.

“CME’s Bitcoin contract may not be first, but they are a larger futures clearinghouse and we are looking forward to our clients trading their product on Sunday evening,” Brooks Dudley, vicepresident of risk in New York at ED&F Man Capital Markets, said in an e-mail. “Not all market participants have been able to short the Cboe Bitcoin futures. We have allowed our clients to go long or short to take advantage of dislocations between the futures and the underlying spot market.”

The CME futures are another step into the mainstream financial world for an asset created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as an alternative to banks and government-issued currencies. The contracts, which settle in dollars and trade on regulated exchanges, can be bought by institutional investors that are prohibited from buying Bitcoin directly on largely unregulated exchanges. — Bloomberg