(Bloomberg) -- Just before 3 p.m. Chicago time on Wednesday June 19, a bit of Bitcoin fanfare will die.
That's the moment the last Bitcoin futures contract on Cboe Global Markets Inc. will settle, with no more to follow. Only a year and a half ago, the then-president of Cboe, Chris Concannon, heralded the derivatives as game changers for finance, saying "Over the next 10 years we believe that the cryptocurrency market will explode in terms of the assets that they touch, the currencies that they involve." Cboe was the first U.S. exchange to list Bitcoin futures, followed shortly by CME Group Inc.
Cboe "is assessing its approach with respect to how it plans to continue to offer digital asset derivatives for trading, but we have nothing new to announce at this time," spokeswoman Suzanne Cosgrove said in an emailed statement. The company said in a March posting that it wouldn't be adding new Bitcoin contracts after the June expiration.
While Cboe may have been first, CME's Bitcoin future soon gained wider acceptance. In March, the number of open contracts on CME was almost six times the amount on Cboe. Since then, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been on a bit of a bull run, and CME notched a one-day volume record for its contract on April 4. Since the beginning of April, Bitcoin has jumped about 80% to around $7,600, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Leising in Los Angeles at mleising@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, ;Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Dave Liedtka, Andrew Dunn
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