The volume of BTC futures trading has fallen significantly. As a study conducted by the analytics resource TradeBlock showed, in December 2018, that is, a year after the launch of these trading instruments, exchanges recorded the lowest volumes of Bitcoin futures trading. And this is despite the fact that the combined trading volumes in the summer of 2018 practically reached parity with the performance of spot markets on the five largest US exchanges. However, following the peak of the futures market in July and August 2018, volumes shrank by almost half in September and have been steadily declining ever since. The weakening of investor interest in Bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) led to a drop in trading of this asset to the lowest level since December 2017. Only November broke out of the downtrend, when volumes grew amid high volatility and a number of price breakouts, as a result of which the average daily trading volume jumped by about 41% compared to the previous quarter. On the CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange), BTC trading figures are also falling.
Most of the deals fall exclusively on the CME. At first, the CBOE and CME platforms went side by side, but since February 2018 the distance between them began to steadily grow, as a result of which the Chicago Mercantile Exchange CME began to dominate in the volume of Bitcoin futures deals. The peak figures occurred in July 2018, when futures trading volumes exceeded 5 billion dollars. At the same time, spot market figures on digital currency exchanges in the US fell. On the five largest US crypto exchanges — Coinbase, itBit, Kraken, Bitstamp and Gemini — it sharply collapsed from 20 to 5 billion dollars. In the period from January to October 2018, the volume of spot trading, following the trend of the Bitcoin price, fell by 85 percent. However, by the end of 2018 the volumes nevertheless began a gradual movement upward.
The decline in futures trading in the second half of 2018, combined with the recovery of spot markets, led to a consistent development of spot trading in early 2019. It is important to note the launch planned for 2019 of several Bitcoin futures products at once from companies such as Bakkt, Nasdaq, ErisX, and CoinFLEX. It will be interesting to see how these events affect volumes, given their widespread coverage in the media.
