CME Gearing Up to Launch Bitcoin Volatility Futures Independent From BTC’s Price

In brief

• CME Group plans to launch Bitcoin volatility futures on June 1.
• The products will let traders bet on how much Bitcoin will swing—not its direction or price.
• The contracts will track CME’s Bitcoin Volatility Index (BVX).

CME, the world’s top derivatives marketplace, announced plans Tuesday to launch Bitcoin volatility futures that will soon allow traders to bet on the intensity of the cryptocurrency’s price swings.

The derivatives would allow Bitcoin traders to hedge against fluctuations in the asset's ever-changing price, without betting on the price of Bitcoin itself. The product will debut on June 1, CME said, pending regulatory review.

“With our new Bitcoin volatility futures, traders will be able to invest or hedge against the future volatility of Bitcoin, allowing them to access a critical new layer of risk management,” Giovanni Vicioso, CME’s global head of crypto products, said in a statement.

Financial products tracking Bitcoin volatility have come in vogue this year, as institutions and retail traders seek increasingly sophisticated ways to hedge against long-term Bitcoin positions. In March, CoinShares filed to offer Wall Street’s first Bitcoin volatility ETFs.

Those ETFs tracked CME’s Bitcoin Volatility Index, or BVX, which, since 2024, has offered a real-time benchmark of the volatility of Bitcoin options contracts traded on CME. Put simply, the BVX tracks whether the market, at any given moment, is betting that Bitcoin’s price will swing wildly or stay steady.

CME’s Bitcoin volatility futures would also track the BVX, which is published every second between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. CT on the marketplace’s trading days.

Earlier this year, CME announced plans to expand its crypto product trading hours to 24/7, following the lead of other major Wall Street players seeking to keep up with the nonstop cadence of the digital assets market. Until now, CME crypto products have traded 23 hours a day, with a weekend break between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening.

CME’s nonstop crypto trading is set to go live on May 29, days before the Bitcoin volatility futures are penciled to launch.

Bitcoin has recently been rebounding, rising above $81,000 on Tuesday for the first time since January. The leading cryptocurrency had fallen close to the $60,000 mark this spring after peaking above $126,000 last October.

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