Bitcoin Investors Go Crazy as CBOE’s Futures Contracts Go Live
The much-awaited Bitcoin futures contracts are finally launched and as per the scheduled time, CBOE launched the futures contracts yesterday on December 10 sharp at 6 pm EST. In just a few moments after the launch, investors orders on the exchange piled up in huge numbers and the exchange’s website soon crashed and was under downtime.
Sighting the reason for such a huge traffic and massive influx of orders, CBOE soon announced the proceedings on its Twitters handle. The exchange tweeted “Due to heavy traffic on our website, visitors to http://www.cboe.com may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable. All trading systems are operating normally.”
A lot of euphoria and excitement that was built around the Bitcoin futures contracts was seen and deflected in practice on the very first day of the launch. The launch of Bitcoin futures catapulted Bitcoin out of some serious woes it suffered during the weekend.
On Saturday, Bitcoin price fell sharply by over 15% going as low as $13k before it was finally pulled up from there onwards. This shows that there is a lot of positivity and confidence amongst investors and the momentum can sustain further in this week as CME Group is also launching its futures contracts on next Monday, December 18.
Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital in Sydney said “Bitcoin’s price surge continues to look like another speculative mania. Futures trading in bitcoin...will make it easier to trade which will only suck in more buyers. It’s impossible to know how high it will get and for how long, so shorting it would be very high risk.”
CBOE executives are quite positive on the arrival of bitcoin futures contracts and believe that its success could further give a boost to creating other products and services around Bitcoin like the exchange-traded-funds.
Moreover, many other analysts from the financial world have expressed optimism to the further journey of Bitcoin. Popular investor and CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners - Mike Novogratz and also the creator of the $500 million crypto-hedge-fund has said that he believes Bitcoin to touch $40,000 by the end of 2018.
Another analyst and Kenetic Capital managing partner - Jehan chu while speaking to Bloomberg TV expressed similar views and said that Bitcoin could possibly touch $50,000 by the end of 2018. “I think we’re going to see $50,000 by the end of 2018 for bitcoin. I think with the one-two punch with the Cboe and CME I think the entire world is on watch now for what is to come and what the real liquidity that can enter this market will actually look like,” Chu said.
It will be too early to say anything at the moment about how futures contracts can add value to Bitcoin in the long run, but for the time being, the optimism continues to drive ahead the price further.