The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) will launch Micro Ether futures on Dec. 6, pending regulatory review, the exchange announced Tuesday.
- The CME already offers a number of crypto derivative products including 20 Micro products such as Micro Bitcoin futures, which were launched in May.
- The Micro Bitcoin futures product organizes futures around 1/10th of a bitcoin. Similarly, the Micro Ether futures will also be sized at 1/10th of one ether.
- The company said the new contract will be cash-settled, based on the CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate, which is used as a daily reference rate of the U.S. dollar price of ether.
- The much-anticipated futures contracts for ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain network, launched in February.
- “Since the launch of Ether futures in February, we have seen steady growth in liquidity in these contracts, especially among institutional traders,” said Tim McCourt, CME Group’s global head of equity index and alternative investment products. “At the same time, the price of ether has more than doubled since these contracts were introduced, creating demand for a micro-sized contract to make this market even more accessible to a broader range of participants.”
Read more: CME to Launch Micro Bitcoin Futures in May
