// block 498637 · bitcoin · 10 December 2017
The first regulated bitcoin futures open
The moment this block marks: the opening of trading in Cboe bitcoin futures (XBT), 17:00 in Chicago, 10 December 2017, 23:00:00 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 498,637, 10 December 2017, 23:06:46 UTC.
In December 2017 the price of bitcoin was climbing fast enough to draw Wall Street in, and two Chicago exchanges raced to list the first futures contracts on it. Cboe Global Markets won by a week. Its futures exchange, CFE, had certified the product with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and on 4 December it announced that trading would start on Sunday 10 December at 17:00 Chicago time, at the opening of its global trading hours.
The contracts traded under the ticker XBT. Each covered one bitcoin and was settled in cash against the price of a daily auction on the Gemini exchange, and Cboe waived its fees for the rest of the month. Trading began, in Cboe's words, “exactly as planned”: the opening price was $15,000, and 890 contracts had changed hands by 19:15. Over the first day the futures rose by about 19 percent.
CME Group, the largest futures exchange in the world, followed on 17 December with a contract for five bitcoins. Investors could now take a position on the price of bitcoin, rising or falling, on a regulated American market, without holding a single coin.
Block 498,637 was mined nearly seven minutes after trading opened, at 17:06 in Chicago, in the first minutes of the new market. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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