CME Claims Record Ethereum Volumes

Wall Street’s futures exchange, CME, has announced that the third quarter broke all records in ethereum futures volumes and crypto volumes overall.

“Q3 2022 average daily Open Interest (OI) reached a record 174,537 contracts across all crypto products, outpacing Q2 by more than 64%,” the exchange said.

Average daily volumes for just bitcoin stood at 13,693 contracts, each being the equivalent of 5 bitcoins, making it 68,465 or $1.4 billion a day on average. That’s 18% higher than in Q2.

There have been days that far surpass this amount, the first time being in 2019, with daily volumes of circa $1 billion in bitcoin futures being fairly common for CME.

They also launched micro bitcoin futures in March last year, each contract worth 0.1 BTC, with it seeing 8% growth in Q3 at about 11,000 contracts a day.

Ethereum futures were also added last year, seeing a 10% growth in contract volumes of 7.2k, and 19% growth in Open Interest.

“Ether futures Q3 2022 average daily volume (ADV) reached a record 7,247 contracts (+10% vs. Q2-22), while Micro Ether futures achieved a record ADV of 22,145 contracts and average daily OI of 50,369 contracts throughout the quarter,” the exchange said.

This shows “institutional investors continued to turn to our products to hedge market risk and gain exposure to this asset class,” according to CME.

That’s during a quarter when most assets did not see much action, yet volumes were unusually high compared to ‘ordinary’ sideways.

This high volume has added to speculation that selling pressure was being absorbed by buyers at those levels, with cryptos then seeing a breakout this week.

The fact CME saw such high volumes as well may indicate that institutional investors and Wall Street has been sneakingly accumulating during much of summer.

Whether that suggests a floor has been found remains to be seen, but regulated crypto volumes are now running into the tens of billions.