CME Requests x2 Bitcoin Futures Capacity By CFTC As Interest Soars

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group is petitioning the United States regulators to allow its clients to double their Bitcoin futures open positions. In short, CME requests doubled Bitcoin futures because of the increased interest and officially put its plans before the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

If all of this is successful, each investor would gain a monthly limit of 2,000 contracts per spot monthly instead of the current 1,000. Nasdaq officially presented the news on September 12, which went viral on many best cryptocurrency news sites.

The move also comes on the back of the constant growth in demand for Bitcoin futures. CME’s volumes have been setting new records on a regular basis. As Nasdaq noted, CME requests doubled Bitcoin futures capacity but CFTC states that lower-risk trading instruments are not a subject to limits.

Therefore, an agreement to lessen the strict controls for CME could be construed as the regulator has more faith in Bitcoin (BTC) options than ever before. As a spokesperson told the publication:

“This is one more way we’re providing customers, institutional traders and end-users with additional flexibility to trade and hedge bitcoin price risk,” he said in the latest cryptocurrency news.

Now that CME requests a doubled BTC futures capacity, it is also worth mentioning that the exchange was one of the first Bitcoin futures operators which launched its product in December 2017.

Ever since then, the market has expanded a lot and the second half of this year is set to see a significant increase in overall interest. Later in September, Bakkt which is a regulated ecosystem for institutional investors also announced the launch of their Bitcoin futures market – in the form of paying out returns in BTC instead of fiat currency.

Meanwhile, the leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance is apparently also testing two potential futures trading platforms. All of this is proof that CME requests increaed capacity because of huge interest for Bitcoin futures on the market.

In the daily Bitcoin and altcoin news, we can see greens and positive influx of money. The total crypto market cap has climbed to $263 billion and Bitcoin is leading the gains with a 1.53% surge on the day and a current price of $10,305.