Markets
CME forecasts bitcoin spot trading – report – Ledger Insights
Last week, the Financial Times reported that CME Group is considering launching cryptocurrency spot trading and is discussing the topic with traders. The news came from people close to the negotiations rather than the CME itself.
CME competitor Cboe entered the spot market in 2021 by acquiring ErisX. Last month he announced that it was close spot trading side.
However, the two derivatives exchanges have very different histories when it comes to crypto. Cboe launched futures contracts in 2017 at the height of that boom, but abandoned them after the crypto crash of 2019. In contrast, the CME has persisted. The net result is that CME dominates the regulated futures market with nearly 30,000 open interests compared to less than a thousand for Cboe Digital.
Crypto exchange Binance has dominated futures trading for years, despite being largely unregulated. Although the FT reported that CME had overtaken Binance, we were unable to verify this. CME open interest is valued at around $2 billion, compared to $18 billion on Binance globally, according to CoinGecko. The gap is larger 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 United States, there are EDX Markets, backed by Citadel Securities, Fidelity and Schwab, which supports Bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin. Deutsche Börse launched its DBDX few months ago.