Bitcoin
CME Planning Bitcoin Spot Trading – Report – Ledger Insights
Last week the Financial Times reported that the CME group was planning to launch cryptocurrency spot trading and was discussing the matter with traders. The news came from people familiar with the negotiations, not from the CME itself.
CME competitor Cboe entered the spot market in 2021 by acquiring ErisX. Last month, he announced that he was closing the spot trade side.
However, the two derivatives exchanges have very different histories with crypto. Cboe launched futures in 2017 at the height of that boom, but abandoned them after the crypto crash in 2019. By contrast, CME has persisted. The net result is that CME dominates the regulated futures market, with about 30,000 open contracts versus less than a thousand for Cboe Digital.
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has dominated futures trading for years, although it is largely unregulated. Although the FT reported that CME surpassed Binance, it was unable to verify this. CME’s open interest is valued at around $2 billion, compared to $18 billion on Binance globally, according to CoinGecko. The difference is greater when it comes to daily volumes.
Returning to spot markets, the focus of CME’s new interest, the institutional space is increasingly busy. In the USA, there are EDX Markets, backed by Citadel Securities, Fidelity and Schwab, which supports Bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin. Deutsche Börse has launched its DBDX Some months ago.