The first ever futures market for Bitcoin opened today, and despite an early glitch things were pretty tame, at least by crytpo currency standards.

About ten minutes after the market opened, it crashed. The CBOE team said it was due to overwhelming interest, but it seems like it was more of a technical glitch. After more than an hour of trading there were only about 600 contracts trading which is a little over $9 million notional, so I doubt that sort of low trading volume would cause their system to crash. I am assuming a technical glitch caused the crash, not overwhelming demand as they tried to portray.

Also, at the time of this writing, the contracts were mostly long positions with futures being traded at a premium of over $400 above the Gemini price at one point. The futures at the CBOE are based on the price at the Gemini exchange. So at least for now, the contract price is a few hundred dollars above the spot price, showing a bullish sentiment going into January.





Overall, a pretty tame day considering many anticipated a giant short that would tank the price of Bitcoin. However, it is still the first day and only the brave probably came out today to trade the historic moment. We should see the number of contracts increase over the coming days as more traders dip their toes in the wild world of Crypto. However, you can read my blog post here where I predict the futures markets may not be as popular with traditional investors as earlier thought.

Also, CBOE is a smaller market than the CME Bitcoin futures market which opens a week from today on the 17th. But as of now, it appears as though the giant short hasn’t happened.