Today, June 3, 2019, it’s expected the settlement of contracts expiring on May 31 and it is certainly no coincidence that shortly before this deadline on May 28, the total open interest has risen to 5,190, an increase of 7% compared to the previous week.
At the end of May, CME’s open interest on bitcoin futures reached its all-time high.
This figure is now the highest ever for CME bitcoin futures.
However, it should also be remembered that since March the other issuer, CBOE, has stopped issuing new bitcoin futures contracts, so all potential subscribers of these contracts for a couple of months now are migrating to the CME platform.
However, throughout 2019 bitcoin futures continued to record continuous increases in volume, probably due to the increase in the value of BTC which reached its annual peak in May.
On Friday, May 31, negotiations on the monthly contracts, which will be settled today, were closed, and according to several analysts, this regulation will be the largest in the history of these contracts. According to some, it could even have an impact on the price of bitcoin itself.
Waiting for the futures of Bakkt and ETFs on bitcoin, CME contracts are now almost a must for large institutional investors who want to invest in fully regulated bitcoin-based financial products, so it should not surprise at all the new record set in May.
In fact, interest in BTC seems to have infected even more institutional investors, albeit still to a small extent, and this inevitably brings customers precisely to these specific CME financial products.
On the contrary, given the interest that is emerging in these futures contracts, the continuous postponement of decisions on new Bakkt futures contracts by the CFTC, or ETFs on bitcoin by the SEC, are somewhat out of tune, but obviously, markets are moving at a much faster pace than regulators, as usual.
