The world’s leading financial derivatives marketplace has launched two new products to help Bitcoin and Ethereum efficiently hedge market-moving events.

On Tuesday (March 1), CME Group announced that “it plans to launch options on Micro Bitcoin and Micro Ether futures on March 28, pending regulatory review.”

According to CME’s press release, these new Micro Bitcoin and Micro Ether options contracts will be “one-tenth of their respective underlying tokens in size and will offer a wide range of market participants – from institutions to sophisticated, active, individual traders – more ways to manage their exposure to the top two cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.” They will “complement the existing Bitcoin options contracts, sized at five bitcoin and launched in 2020” and will “allow clients to express long- or short-term views with a choice of monthly as well as Monday, Wednesday and Friday weekly options expiries.”

Tim McCourt, Global Head of Equity and FX Products, CME Group, had this to say:

“We have worked closely with clients and the broader industry to establish robust and liquid cryptocurrency futures and options markets at CME Group. At less than a year old, nearly 5.2 million combined Micro Bitcoin and Micro Ether futures contracts have changed hands. Building on the strength and liquidity of the underlying contracts, our micro-sized options will enable traders of all sizes to efficiently hedge market-moving events with greater precision and flexibility or fine-tune their cryptocurrency market exposure.“

Joshua Lim, Head of Derivatives at Genesis Global Trading, said:

“Micro options provide the targeted risk exposure that investors are looking for. We are excited to offer liquidity on the broad and growing family of CME Group cryptocurrency products.“

And John Harris, CEO of Akuna Digital Assets, added:

“Akuna Capital is looking forward to providing liquidity to CME Group options on Micro Bitcoin and Micro Ether futures contracts. We believe that options on these contracts will allow existing market participants greater flexibility when seeking cost-efficient exposure as well as opening the market to new participants who prefer the more granular sizing.“

On 30 March 2021, CME Group announced that it would “expand its suite of crypto derivatives with the introduction of a new Micro Bitcoin futures contract on May 3.” And on 2 November 2021, CME Group announced that it would “expand its crypto derivatives offerings with the introduction of Micro Ether futures on December 6.”

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The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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