CFTC approves Bitcoin trading on three US exchanges

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approved Bitcoin futures trading on three US exchanges. The CFTC made the official announcement on Friday.

According to the CFTC, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the CBOE Futures Exchange self-certified new contracts for bitcoin futures products. The CFTC also said that the Cantor Exchange self-certified a new contract for options of bitcoin binary.

US stock exchanges gained CFTC approval due to self-certification

The benefit of futures contracts is that they allow traders the possibility to bet on bitcoin prices and make profits without having to actually buy bitcoins.

However, in order to obtain the approval, the stock exchanges had to go through a process called self-certification, which means that they analyzed, proved and pledged in front of the CFTC that their products meet the requirements of the law.

The approval is considered to be an important step in pushing bitcoin to the Wall Street, as futures contracts could suppose the participation in bitcoin trading of Wall Street companies.

However, the CFTC said that bitcoin still remains an unsupervised market, considering that bitcoin as a commodity is different from any other type of commodity the CFTC has handled in the past. The commission also said that it will monitor bitcoin futures closely.

J. Christopher Giancarlo, the CFTC's Chairman stated:

“We expect that the futures exchanges, through information sharing agreements, will be monitoring the trading activity on the relevant cash platforms for potential impacts on the futures contracts’ price discovery process, including potential market manipulation and market dislocations due to flash rallies and crashes and trading outages.”

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) subsequently announced that it will launch its bitcoin futures contracts on December 18. CBOE did not reveal when the release date will occur. Both stated that their bitcoin futures products will settle in cash. The news further increased bitcoin's price.