Wall Street’s bitcoin futures expire tomorrow after their biggest month in terms of volumes so far.
An incredible 97,605 bitcoin equivalent contracts exchanged hands on Tuesday, worth some $1.7 billion.
While on Wednesday 85,000 exchanged hands, worth some $1.5 billion, making CME one of the world’s biggest exchange for bitcoin futures and the biggest by far on Wall Street.
These are paper futures with no direct influence on bitcoin’s price as no bitcoins exchange hands whatever.
Instead all is in dollars with the distribution of such dollars based on bitcoin’s movement on spot exchanges like Coinbase.
As it happens, there were some shenanigans at Coinbase earlier today, with it unclear who was behind these shenanigans.
What is clear however is they coincide with the monthly expiry of bitcoin futures at CME, with COINBASE previously stating some 60% of their traders are institutional investors.
So did these banksters go half long and half short? That’s something only SEC knows and SEC happens to be their friend, with no concrete evidence of it so far.
An innocent explanation may well be they had to close their positions ahead of futures expiry, and so it happens they did it kind of all at once.
That means they may well have cleared the way now for the new futures contract, with bitcoin’s price generally rising after Wall Street’s dip, but whether it will do so again remains to be seen.
