Nasdaq Confirms the Arrival of Its Bitcoin Futures Contracts by H1 2019
Last week, WorldCoinIndex reported that the world’s second largest stock exchange - Nasdaq is planning to launch Bitcoin Futures Contracts next year. Some internal sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Nasdaq is currently working with the CFTC to get the regulatory approval for its futures contracts.
This Monday, December 3, Nasdaq has officially confirmed the arrival of its Bitcoin Futures Contracts by the first-half of 2019. The UK Daily Express exclusively reported the entire story saying that this “move will mark a step change in how the decade-old crypto accelerates acceptance and mass adoption throughout the world”.
On the other hand, Joseph Christinat, Vice President of Nasdaq’s media team, also talked with the publication. Christinat said: “Bitcoin Futures will be listed and it should launch in the first half of next year – we’re just waiting for the go ahead from the CFTC but there’s been enough work put into this to make that academic. “We’ve seen plenty of speculation and rumors about what we might be doing, but no one has thought to come to us and ask if we can confirm it, so, here you go – we’re doing this, and it’s happening.”
The latest confirmation from Nasdaq comes at a time when the entire crypto market is going through a rough phase. The overall crypto market valuation has dropped more than 80% since its peak over $800 billion in January 2019.
However, Christinat says that his company remains unfazed by such boom and bust cycles and continues to believe in the long-term story of Bitcoin. He added: “We got into the blockchain game five years ago, and when the technology first popped up we just leant out of the window and shouted ‘hey come over here’ right at it.
“We’ve put a hell of a lot of money and energy into delivering the ability to do this and we’ve been all over it for a long time – way before the market went into turmoil, and that will not affect the timing of this in any way. No. Period. We’re doing this no matter what.”
While this year has turned out to be the year of huge meltdown and regulatory intervention, we expect that next year turns out to be in the favor of investors. Moreover, a number of institutional products are lined up for launch the next year.
The first-half of 2019 will be pretty interesting as we have two Bitcoin futures contracts - One by Nasdaq and the other by ICE’s Bakkt - as well as the probability of VanEck CBOE Bitcoin ETF approval. If all falls in place, we might also see big financial institutions pouring huge sums of money in the crypto space.