Giovanni Vicioso, the executive director of equity and alternative products at the CME Group, told Cointelegraphin an exclusive interview that the impending introduction of Bitcoin and Ether futures products denominated in euros would increase institutional cryptocurrency adoption in the eurozone.
“I think when you look at our current suite of United States dollar-denominated products, we have a fairly diverse appendix of participants, like traditional proprietary trading firms that are providing liquidity for those products, and I anticipate that some of those participants are also going to provide liquidity for the euro-based products as well.”
Vicioso said that long-term cryptocurrency investors, small asset managers, and macro hedge funds were also interested in CME’s impending euro-denominated futures products.
CME Group, which consists of four exchanges, is the largest derivatives marketplace globally. The company is getting ready to add euro-denominated Micro Bitcoin and Micro Ether futures products to its lineup of cryptocurrency derivatives. The launch is scheduled for March 18.
According to Vicioso, Cointelegraph, the launch of the products priced in euros would effectively establish a de facto foreign exchange (FX) contract, which is anticipated to draw in additional market participants:
“You can either long the U.S. dollar contract and short the euro version or vice versa, and you could do that with the Bitcoin and Ether contract. You buy one, sell the other, and you’ve got a de facto FX contract.”
Since the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were approved in the United States on January 11, exchange-traded products (ETPs) based on bitcoin have attracted a lot of attention. On February 28, the nine new spot Bitcoin ETFs—aside from the converted Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) ETF—recorded a combined daily volume of over $2 billion for the second day in a row.
The anticipation and regulatory approval of the U.S.-based spot Bitcoin ETFs has led to an increase in overall institutional interest in Bitcoin, according to Vicioso.“SinceSeptember, we have seen an uptick in Euro-denominated Bitcoin and Ether volumes and we also continue to hear of growing customer interest, particularly in euro-denominated cryptocurrency products.”
In 2024, the CME’s average daily trading volume for Bitcoin increased to almost $3 billion, almost doubling from an average of $1.6 billion in 2023, according to Vicioso.
In the 24 hours before 1:15 pm UTC, Bitcoin dropped 0.62% to trade at $62,383. The weekly chart of the world’s first cryptocurrency shows a 22.50% increase.