CME Group to launch options on Ethereum

What’s new? The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has announced plans to launch options on Ethereum. This will happen on September 12, subject to regulatory review. Tim McCourt, CME’s Global Head of Equity and FX Products, explained that the launch of the new product is based on the significant growth and high liquidity of existing ETH futures, which already have over 1,8 million contracts. According to McCourt, there is a demand from market participants for ETH price risk management as the long-awaited release of The Merge upgrade to the Ethereum network approaches.

CME Group’s press release

What else does the press release say? According to the statement, CME Group’s ETH futures contracts and micro futures have experienced tremendous growth and continue to provide consistent liquidity, volume, and open interest. Key asset futures trading indicators include:

• July average daily volume (ADV) of 7,900 contracts, and open interest (OI) of 3,900 contracts. The latter was up by more than 7% compared to June.
• Record ADV in Q2 was 6,700 contracts, OI of 3,500 contracts. Q2 average daily volume increased by more than 27% compared to Q1.

Key micro ETH futures trading results include:

• July ADV of 25 700 contracts, up more than 41% from June, and OI of 47 000 contracts, up 43% from June.
• Record ADV for Q2 was 21 300 contracts, up 12% from Q1.
• Record OI was 47 800 contracts, an increase in OI of more than 34% over Q1.

What is known about CME Group? It is a derivatives trading platform that allows one to trade futures, options, optimize portfolios and analyze data for risk management. CME Group’s exchanges offer a wide range of global reference marks across all major asset classes based on interest rates, stock indices, and currencies. CME Group launched its first dollar-denominated BTC futures contract in December 2017, followed by an ETH futures contract in February 2021. In March 2022, the exchange also launched options futures based on BTC and ETH. In addition, CME will launch BTC and ETH futures in euros on August 29.

Earlier, cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX announced the launch of trading tokens of Ethereum hard fork tokens, which will continue to operate on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. The split may occur following the main network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). In this case, the exchange will offer customers to trade linear futures margin contracts on ETHPoW with collateral in USDT. The product ETHPOWZ22 is already available for study in the testnet.

On August 7, cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex launched trading of Ethereum hardfork tokens. Customers can exchange ETH at a 1:1 ratio to one of two tokens: ETHS (PoS) or ETHW (PoW).