This winter is looking like it’s going to be a wild ride for Bitcoin. After soaring to unimaginable heights, the cryptocurrency is now launching itself into one of the highest levels of finance.
On Monday, the world of Wall Street officially welcomed Bitcoin for the first time ever.
Bitcoin on Wall Street
The CBOE group or Chicago Board Options Exchange is the group responsible for establishing future contracts on Bitcoin. Investors will now be able to trade this asset on the exchanges without needing to work with questionable brokers. No longer will they struggle with owning an asset that is unregulated and whose management is often costly due to transaction fees that can sometimes be as high as $20 per transaction.
This new type of contract, put in place by the CBOE group, is the first of its kind for a cryptocurrency on Wall Street. It offers a brand-new way for professionals to safely invest in this cryptocurrency. There are already similar futures contracts available on other assets, currencies and commodities.
The Bitcoins introduced to the Wall Street trading rooms will be housed in the same style as regular currencies, with transaction fees somewhere in between $0.25 and $0.50. This was announced by the CBOE group themselves and with this bold action, they are helping to make Bitcoin more accessible and giving it legitimacy in the world of finance. With being one step closer to its goal, Bitcoin’s loyal followers are already considering getting authorization from the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to make the asset into an ETF (Exchange-traded fund).
Nothing Can Resist Its Pull
No one seems to be able to resist this cryptocurrency’s ever-growing gravity. Last week, Bitcoin even managed to beat its own records several times in a row and right now, its value is sitting somewhere around the $19,000 mark.
Just hours after its first listing on Monday, at midnight, the cryptocurrency was still showing signs of its usual upward trend. Eight hours after its appearance, approximately 2725 contracts were traded, and Bitcoin’s value has continued to rise ever since.
XBTF8, which was the main futures contract placed on the market with a value $15,000, showed a 26% increase over those first 8 hours. This morning, its value even came close to $18,850.
However, there were brief suspensions that took place during some of the more erratic periods of variation. Experts were fearing extreme volatility due to the financial frenzy around Bitcoin in recent months.
For Tom Lerhkinder, an analyst at Tabb GROUP, he believes that on a purely technical level, the futures contracts behaved exactly as planned. There was even so much activity on the exchange that the CBOE group’s website went down for during the first twenty minutes.
With it being rather slow day on the markets, Bitcoin was the star of the show. The closing of its first session on Wall Street is scheduled for 22:15 tonight. It took less than 24 hours for Bitcoin to prove that its value is not just a coincidence. At 11:10, Bitcoin was only a few hundred dollars away from its record of $17,027.39, which was reached on December 8th.
Despite all the buzz about the cryptocurrency, many experts still remain skeptical and are guarding themselves against any potential market manipulation.
