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Cardano, Solana Futures On The Horizon
Speaking during the CryptoCompare Digital Asset Summit on Wednesday, Payal Shah, the director of equity and cryptocurrency products at CME, stated that they were looking beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum owing to increased demand from clients and could soon add Solana and Cardano futures.
“We are looking at it,” she said, adding that “the number of client requests in anything outside the top two [such as] Solana Cardano” had grown enormously.
Shah, who spoke alongside a panel of top-rated institutional market participants however noted that they face certain stumbling blocks to launching altcoin futures. First, she noted that the Bitcoin and Ethereum futures were settled on an Index. By this, CME had contracted five crypto exchanges that simultaneously share real-time price quotes to enable the firm to settle on a precise price for Bitcoin and Ethereum futures. She thus stated that they needed to build a similar index for other cryptocurrencies, hence the delay in launching any product below the top two coins.
She also stated that the CME was particularly concerned about the regulatory obscurity around cryptocurrencies, specifically altcoins hence the need to conduct some more due diligence. “We need to know where to send the paperwork,” Shah went on, “do we send it to the SEC, CFTC, to have some regulatory certainty about who is putting their arms around that?”
 
 
Last year, the Chicago-based firm refuted claims that it was launching Dogecoin futures after a tweet from FirstSquawk, a financial ‘breaking’ news outlet published the misleading statement.
More Altcoin Futures To Come
Shah emphasized that once all these blocks were removed, they were going to begin releasing new crypto products since it was certainly something that their clients are asking for. “The speed at which we are bringing new products to the market I think that will certainly continue over 2022 and 2023”.
In 2017, CME launched bitcoin futures before introducing Bitcoin options in November 2019. In February 2021, the firm later launched Ether futures before launching micro Bitcoin futures and micro Ether futures in May and December respectively.
On March 28, 2022, CME announced the addition of Micro-sized Bitcoin and Ether options to its suite of products. That said, the firm has been off to a good start, and “the screens are lit” since it started offering crypto derivatives according to Shah. So far, the firm has already handled close to 5M contracts and over 1.2M contracts on Micro bitcoin and Ether futures.
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