'According to Plan': CBOE Bullish on First Day of Bitcoin Futures Trading

The first day of bitcoin futures trading on the CBOE exchange is over and the day largely went according to plan, according to its CEO.

Overall, Monday saw the price of bitcoin push above $17,000 on CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) to hit a new all-time high in the hours after the Chicago-based firm began trading the derivatives. That process began late Sunday, an event that coincided with a near-simultaneous crashing of CBOE's website.

The price of bitcoin jumped over $1,000 in minutes.

Reports indicate, however, that trading has gone relatively smoothly since then. As Bloomberg shows, CBOE's circuit breakers – essentially market backstops that pause trading during periods of heightened volatility – were triggered twice during the first six hours of trading yesterday.

No circuit breakers were activated during Monday trading, according to CBOE.

"The trading has been orderly. We hit a couple of our circuit-breaker halts, but those were due to price movement in futures and not due to any systems issues. We halted like our rules said we would and opened back up," Michael Mollet, director of product development for CBOE, told the Washington Post.

Market data indicates that CBOE's January contract is trading at about $18,000, according to CNBC, with 197 contracts worth of volume since the Dec. 12 session officially began.

For CBOE, the results are very encouraging, according to its chairman and CEO.

Speaking with Fox Business' Neil Cavuto at the conclusion of the Dec. 11 trading session, Ed Tilly said yesterday's kick-off went "according to plan."

He said in the interview:

"I think it’s pretty positive. Think about never having traded this contract in a lit futures market before. There was that kind of confidence in CBOE's systems to bring this contract up."

Looking ahead

Yet, if today's trading is indicative of how the nascent market for cryptocurrency derivatives progresses, the next week should be a notable one as well.

Indeed, CBOE's launch is the first of two planned regulated futures launches happening this month. CME Group is expected to launch contracts on Dec. 18.

Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, as indicated earlier this month by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (which oversees the U.S. market for derivatives), is preparing to create binary options tied to bitcoin.

And while it has slipped somewhat from the high it hit earlier today, the price of bitcoin has remained above $16,000, trading at roughly $16,680 at time of publication, according to data from CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index.

Disclosure: CME Group is an investor in Digital Currency Group, CoinDesk's parent company.

Market data image via Shutterstock