CME Group plans changes to Bitcoin Options
CME Group today announced planned changes to Bitcoin Options. Effective Sunday, March 7 (trade date Monday, March 8), CME Group will expand the strike price in the external instrument to display the full strike price for Bitcoin Options.
The external instrument name is provided in MDP 3.0 tag 55-Symbol and iLink tag 107-SecurityDesc. As a reminder, CME Group does not recommend parsing the external instrument name to determine instrument characteristics.
Please Note: tag 202-Strike Price on the MDP 3.0 Security Definition (tag 35-MsgType=d) message will not change.
To facilitate this change, customers will be asked to cancel all Good ‘Till Cancel (GTC) and Good ‘Till Date (GTD) orders for these contracts, including any User- or Exchange-Defined Spreads, by the close on Friday, March 5. After 16:00 CT on Friday, March 5, any remaining GT orders on these markets will be removed by the CME Global Command Center (GCC).
Example:
- BTCZ0 P12700 = Strike Price 12700
- BTCZ0 P105000= Strike Price 105000
These changes will be available for customer testing in New Release on Monday February 8.
Let’s note that CME Group has recently announced it intends to launch Ether futures trading starting February 8, 2021, pending regulatory review. Ether futures will join CME Group’s Bitcoin futures and options.
As CME Bitcoin futures marked their third anniversary on December 17, 2020, the company said that there has been significant growth in their adoption from a broad array of participants, including institutional investors. From January to mid-December 2020, 8,560 CME Bitcoin futures contracts (equivalent to about 42,800 bitcoin) have traded on average each day. At the same time, institutional interest continues to build with the number of large open interest holders reaching a record of 110 in December.