18 Jan 2021
Zooming in on CME’s BTC Futures: The new top dog in the futures market
The bitcoin futures at CME have been going like hot cake lately, as the daily trade volume frequently has reached new records while the open interest has risen to new all-time highs.
On January 8th, the CME futures saw a daily trade volume of a staggering $4.8 billion.To put this number into context, the daily trade volume on January 8th was higher than the entire monthly trade volume in October ’19 ($3.9b), November’19 ($4.2b), and December’19 ($3.9b).Open interest on CME has naturally followed suit with the increased trade volume and reached an all-time high of $2.4 billion on January 14th.In terms of Open Interest, CME has been the largest exchange in the bitcoin futures market eight days so far this year. Accounting on average for well above 16% of the total open interest in the futures market.This is in stark contrast to CME’s position back in January 2020, where CME’s open interest average size was 17% of the then leading platform, BitMEX, and only accounted for 6% of the total market.With institutional investors having flocked into the bitcoin market, it is about time to ask the question: When will we see a bitcoin ETF?