For instance, Bakkt’s BTC futures volumes touched an all-time high (ATH) on December 18, 2019, and came awfully close to the ATH on January 7. That day in mid-December, there were 6,601 traded contracts and on Tuesday, January 7, Bakkt saw 4,823 ($40.75 million) traded contracts. CME volumes and open interest have seen steady demand as well, as the Twitter account @ecoinometrics noted this week. The following day after Bakkt’s $40 million in trades, Ecoinometrics explained in its “CME Bitcoin Futures Activity Report” it’s noticed that “strong trade volume and open interest are staying above average compared to the past few months.” Additionally, news.Bitcoin.com reported on CME announcing that it would soon offer options on its bitcoin futures products and options trading might begin this week. CME explained that “increased demand” made them file to twofold the 30-day open positions threshold to 10,000 BTC.
Financial columnist Joanna Ossinger noted that if CME’s options products are approved by regulators, trading could begin as early as January 12 through 14. Ossinger’s report also claimed that “institutional interest in bitcoin-related contracts appears to be building” according to JP Morgan Chase & Co. Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, a strategist for JP Morgan, wrote in a note on Friday that CME’s bitcoin futures have seen more interest.
“There has been a step increase in the activity of the underlying CME futures contract over the past few days,” Panigirtzoglou explained. “This unusually strong activity over the past few days likely reflects the high anticipation among market participants of the option contract,” the analyst added. Panigirtzoglou’s report also said that BTC’s “intrinsic value has been rising” but at the moment it “remains below the market price following a significant divergence in the middle of last year.” Panigirtzoglou concluded:
The market price has declined by nearly 40% from its peak while the intrinsic value has risen by around 10%, [but] the gap has not yet fully closed, suggesting some downside risk remains.
Institutional derivatives trading still pales in comparison to the trades taking place on Bitmex, Bitfinex, Okex, Coinflex, Binance, and Huobi. The researchers from @skewdotcom witnessed “serious bitcoin futures volumes” when on Thursday more than $20 billion in BTC-based derivatives were swapped. A chart showing aggregated open interest indicates open interest in crypto-based derivatives from 12 different exchanges is on the rise. Bitmex, Huobi, and Okex continue to dominate the BTC futures landscape and as far as volume is concerned, CME and Bakkt have an extremely long way to go to catch up to the money being swapped on those exchanges.
What do you think about CME Group launching bitcoin options products in the near future? What do you think about the volumes of other exchanges compared to the institutional BTC derivatives offerings from CME and Bakkt?
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Image credits: Shutterstock, @Bakktbot, @skewdotcom, @ecoinometrics, Fair Use, Wiki Commons, CME Group, Bakkt, and Pixabay.
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The post Institutional and Retail Bitcoin Futures Demand Continues to Climb appeared first on Bitcoin News.
source: https://news.bitcoin.com/institutional-and-retail-bitcoin-futures-demand-continues-to-climb/
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