The interest in futures trading has seen a surge due to the increase in Bitcoin’s price this year. Recently, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) enjoyed its best trading day as the daily volume of BTC futures increased more than $1 billion. Besides, other giants in Bitcoin Futures trading such as Binance and BitMEX are also experiencing a significant amount of volumes.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) had opened its Bitcoin Futures trading back in 2017. It is a regulated entity that makes it possible for contracts to be established against the US Dollar (USD).
The CME has enjoyed the unfluctuating flow of volume since 2017. However, with the start of New Year – 2020, the volume of CME’s futures trading has seen an impressive increase with the surge in Bitcoin’s price.
According to data from Skew – a reputable monitoring resource, at the start of this week, CME’s Bitcoin Futures trading recorded roughly $1.1 billion daily basis volume, and this is the third time in CME’s history that it surpassed the $1 billion mark.
Additionally, the data gathered from the website of CME shows that the total amount of the contracts traded is over 23,000 and each contract contains five bitcoins.
$1.1bln bitcoin futures traded yesterday at CME after the long weekend – only third time we record > $1bln pic.twitter.com/dxoblqOvUb
— skew (@skewdotcom) February 19, 2020
Furthermore, some community members argue that the surge in the futures trading is not because of an increase in Bitcoin’s price but other fundamentals including upcoming Bitcoin Halving – a process of cutting down the rate at which new cryptocurrency units are generated.
Bitcoin Halving is one of the most pivotal events of the cryptocurrency industry and is scheduled to take place in less than 77 days. As such, it brings serious attention to the market, particularly Bitcoin.
Mostly, Bitcoin margin trading platforms also feel an imperative rise in their volumes. For instance, by volume, one of the famous futures exchanges BitMEX shows a daily basis trading volume upwards of $4 billion.
Besides, Bitcoin Futures Open Interest has increased more than 60% with the start of the New Year and exceeds $4 billion. Reportedly, BitMEX is also included in this category with about $1.5 billion.
Even though the Bitcoin futures platform is new, it lags behind its competitors and is launched back in September 2019, but also sees a significant rise in its volumes. As per a recent blog post, the weekly trading volume has become more than doubled since the start of 2020.
More importantly, it is worth mentioning that Binance Futures offers more than twenty different contract pairs.