Institutional digital assets platform trueDigital Holdings has announced plans to offer bitcoin derivatives for U.S. investors.

In a press release on Friday, the company said it’s reached an “agreement in principle” to acquire designated contract market (DCM) and swaps execution facility (SEF) registrations with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from a firm called trueEX.

The deal is pending approval from the CFTC, the firm said.

If the bid is successful, the aim is to launch a “fully-regulated” cryptocurrency derivatives exchange that would list trueDigital’s bitcoin physically deliverable swaps, which the firm states “have been self-certified with the CFTC.”

Going forward, the company plans to add additional crypto derivatives.

TrueDigital CEO Thomas Kim said:

"A trueDigital owned and operated regulated exchange is the natural step in our evolution toward achieving our goals. Adding the exchange to our ecosystem delivers a complete end-to-end offering, currently unavailable today, that encompasses tokenization, payments, market data and settlement for the benefit of our clients and partners."

With the move, trueDigital would become one of very few entities offering regulated crypto derivatives in the U.S. If the deal goes through, its main rival would be LedgerX, which launched a bitcoin derivative offering in October 2017.

TrueDigital has previously launched an OTC reference rate for bitcoin and ether.

It has also teamed up with Signature Bank to launch a blockchain-based digital payments platform. The effort received approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services to offer services within the state last December.