Bitcoin futures trading is up. American financial market company CME Group Inc. announced on Twitter early on the morning of Wednesday, October 17, 2018, that its futures products are experiencing rising volume, explaining, “In Q3, Bitcoin futures average daily volume rose 41% and open interest was up 19% over Q2.”
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This is a massive improvement over just two months ago when CME stated that volumes on the futures[2] markets had been in the hole for three consecutive trading sessions. During that time, CME’s data reported less than 2,500 BTC transactions — down from over 8,000 at the month’s midpoint. This represented a fall of nearly 70 percent over eight days.
Now, however, trading is heating up. Per the company’s data, the average daily volume soared[3] above 5,000 contracts in the third quarter, a significant increase from the 3,577 contracts traded in Q2 and a 170 percent hike from the first quarter’s 1,854 contracts.
CME also offered data regarding open interest, which accounts for the total number of unsettled contracts held by current market traders. This figure is also significantly larger, jumping from about 1,500 individual contracts in quarter one to nearly 2,900 contracts in the third quarter. This number has also grown significantly from the second quarter, which boasted just over 2,400 separate contracts.
Tim McCourt, CME’s managing director and global head of equity products and alternative investments, suggested in September that volumes had been spiking and that the firm was witnessing growing interest from Asian markets.
“Out of the 40 percent of bitcoin futures trading on CME that’s outside the United States, approximately 21 percent are coming from Asia,” he mentioned at CoinDesk’s Consensus in Singapore.
CME’s data is somewhat comparable to bitcoin futures products listed
