The trading volume of Bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has seemingly stayed high after it reached a new all-time high last month, when 18,338 contracts were traded on February 19 alone.

According to available data from CME’s website, since then most days have seen on average over 6,000 contracts get traded on the platform, as opposed to an average of 3,000-4,000 per day before the spike.

Bitcoin Futures Volumes

Notably, the 18,338 contracts traded on the CME on February 19, are equivalent to roughly 91,690 bitcoin, or $350 million at current prices. While spot markets trade bigger amounts on daily basis, the trend shows investors’ interest in futures contracts has been growing.

Currently, the only regulated traditional Bitcoin futures markets operating in the US are the CME and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). Both platform listed the financial product back in December of 2017, when bitcoin reached its $20,000 all-time high.

Since BTC hit its all-time high, interest in the cryptocurrency has been waning, along with its price. In 2018, BTC crashed over 85% to a low of little over $3,200.  The drop has seen various traders seemingly lose interest, as over the course of the year trading volumes also went down. Bitcoin use itself also dropped, as transactions on the blockchain dropped significantly, but have started picking up steam in the last few months.

Currently, however, the regulated trading platforms have a small percentage of the cryptocurrency futures trading market, as shown in CryptoCompare’s January 2019 Exchange Review.

Crypto Exchanges Dominate Bitcoin Futures

In the document, it’s possible to see that although BTC futures’ trading volumes have been declining since November, the share the CME and CBOE have had has remained relatively stable, as these represented 4.7% of the total crypto futures market in January.

On average, the daily trading volume of futures products amounted to $1.88 billion, after dropping a whopping 30% since December. BitMEX, a platform well-known for its perpetual swaps, represented 88.3% of the volume.

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Notably, there are alternatives to BitMEX out there for traders who want to trade bitcoin futures without turning to CBOE and CME. Various crypto trading platforms have been enlisting bitcoin futures to try and compete, and some have even launched competitions.

Bibox, for example, has added perpetual contracts to its platform and launched trading competitions to incentivize traders, as covered on CryptoGlobe. Perpetual contracts are a derivative similar to a traditional futures contract, but that doesn’t have expiry or settlement. As such, these products mimic a margin-based spot market.

On Bibox, these are priced in USDT and follow the spot price of BTC and ETH through a weighted-average from 5 top crypto exchanges (Bibox, Binance, Huobi,OKEx, Bitfinex). Traders can leverage their positions up to 50x while being able to change their leverage even after their positions are open. These contracts don’t impose a funding rate.

The cryptocurrency exchange, which harbours traders from all over the globe, has been running a competition to draw in traders. The competition is based on teams, and will award the team with the highest trading volume by March 16 with a 10 BTC prize, while the team that comes in second place is set to receive a 3,000 USDT prize. The team that comes up third is set to receive 2,000 USDT.

Team leaders will also benefit from either a 10% commission from its members’ trading fees, or from preferential trading fees on the Bibox platform.