CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives market, plans to introduce Solana (SOL) futures on March 17, increasing its suite of cryptocurrency derivatives, it stated in a press launch on Friday. The brand new contracts, pending regulatory evaluation, will permit merchants to handle SOL value threat with two contract sizes: 25 SOL and 500 SOL.
“With the launch of our new SOL futures contracts, we’re responding to rising consumer demand for a broader set of regulated merchandise,” stated Giovanni Vicioso, CME Group’s International Head of Cryptocurrency Merchandise.
The contracts will likely be cash-settled, utilizing the CME CF Solana-Greenback Reference Price, which tracks SOL’s value each day at 4:00 p.m. London time. CME already provides bitcoin and ether futures, which have seen important progress in buying and selling exercise. The agency reported a mean each day quantity of 202,000 contracts this 12 months, up 73% from 2024.
Business leaders view the transfer as a step towards larger institutional adoption of crypto. Teddy Fusaro, president of Bitwise Asset Administration, famous that CME’s crypto derivatives have helped pave the best way for regulated monetary merchandise, together with ETFs. Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital added that such merchandise give subtle buyers extra instruments to handle threat and publicity.
With Solana gaining traction amongst builders and buyers, the addition of SOL futures highlights the rising demand for regulated crypto buying and selling merchandise. It may additionally pave the best way for SOL exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to be accredited by the Securities and Trade Fee (SEC).
“CME’s choice to checklist SOL contracts right this moment considerably will increase the chance that corresponding spot ETF purposes might be accredited within the foreseeable future,” stated Sui Chung, CEO of CF Benchmarks.
“Whereas a precise timeline for approval is difficult to discern, it’s possible the SEC will need to see a number of months’ value of buying and selling on the CME and be happy that the futures correlate with the spot market earlier than it appears to approve ETF purposes for SOL.”
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