Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a major futures trading company, plans to offer spot Bitcoin trading to its customers as demand for Bitcoin products increases among market participants, the Financial Times reported. reported on Thursday.
CME is already the top Bitcoin futures exchange based on open interest, but offshore and unregulated Binance dominates the spot market.
The FT reported that the exchange had held talks with traders who wanted to trade bitcoin on the regulated market, citing people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
CME's spot trading business could be operated through the EBS currency trading venue in Switzerland, the report added.
The exchange declined to comment on this report.
The spot market will complement CME's existing standard and micro futures contracts, which are widely considered a proxy for institutional investor activity, and will help the exchange become more dominant in the crypto market. CME is already the top Bitcoin futures exchange based on open interest, while the offshore, unregulated Binance dominates the spot market.
The availability of spot markets means that traders can set up complex multi-leg strategies involving spot and futures markets in one regulated location. Carry traders are known to short CME futures against long positions in the spot market on other exchanges or spot ETFs.
“The current bull market is particularly driven by financial institutions that prefer to trade in regulated means, so the potential opening of a Bitcoin spot market on global derivatives giant CME could push crypto exchanges to We may lose some business,” said founder Markus Thielen. That's 10 times more research.
Updated (May 16, 07:20 UTC): Add details.
