CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives market, plans to introduce Solana (SOL) futures on March 17, increasing its suite of cryptocurrency derivatives, it mentioned in a press launch on Friday. The brand new contracts, pending regulatory evaluate, will permit merchants to handle SOL value danger 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,” mentioned Giovanni Vicioso, CME Group’s World Head of Cryptocurrency Merchandise.
The contracts might be cash-settled, utilizing the CME CF Solana-Greenback Reference Charge, which tracks SOL’s value every day at 4:00 p.m. London time. CME already presents bitcoin and ether futures, which have seen vital progress in buying and selling exercise. The agency reported a mean every day quantity of 202,000 contracts this yr, up 73% from 2024.
Trade leaders view the transfer as a step towards higher institutional adoption of crypto. Teddy Fusaro, president of Bitwise Asset Administration, famous that CME’s crypto derivatives have helped pave the way in which for regulated monetary merchandise, together with ETFs. Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital added that such merchandise give refined traders extra instruments to handle danger and publicity.
With Solana gaining traction amongst builders and traders, the addition of SOL futures highlights the rising demand for regulated crypto buying and selling merchandise. It might additionally pave the way in which for SOL exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to be accredited by the Securities and Change Fee (SEC).
“CME’s choice to listing SOL contracts at this time considerably will increase the chance that corresponding spot ETF functions could possibly be accredited within the foreseeable future,” mentioned Sui Chung, CEO of CF Benchmarks.
“Whereas a precise timeline for approval is tough 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 seems to approve ETF functions for SOL.”
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