On Wednesday (8 February 2023), Terrence A. Duffy, Chairman and CEO of CME Group, which is the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, said that he was pleased by the institutional demand for his company’s crypto derivatives products.
Yesterday, during an interview on CNBC, the CME Group CEO had this to say about institutional demand for their Bitcoin futures products:
“It’s really been interesting what’s going on with Bitcoin. After we saw what happened at the end of last year, with some of the issues going on in the industry, the whole industry of crypto kind of suffered. And then, we saw an uptick in our open interest… and trade… starting around, November, December, and it’s continuing on here.
“So I think people are looking at the regulated market and especially the institutions. And, you know, if we’re going to trade the stuff, we’re going to trade it on a regulated exchange like CME. So we’ve actually seen an uptick in our crypto products… so we’re quite pleased by that.“
Yesterday, during CME Group’s Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call, Duffy said:
“2022 was the best year in CME Group’s history, with record average daily volume of 23.3 million contracts, up 19% from ‘21. The growth was led by our financial products, which finished the year up 25% to a record average daily volume of 19.5 million contracts. Options average daily volume across all asset classes also set a record with ADV of 4.1 million contracts, up 23% versus last year. And finally, our non-U.S. ADV increased to a record 6.3 million contracts.“
On 6 February 2023, Bloomberg reported that “MicroStrategy Inc. co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor said the enterprise-software company, better known as the largest publicly traded holder of Bitcoin, may at some point consider dabbling in futures contracts on CME Group’s marketplace to generate yield.”
