Following numerous headlines about the meteoric price rise of several assets, including GameStop (GME), AMC Entertainment (AMC) stocks, and Dogecoin (DOGE), crypto exchange FTX has listed an index following the assets. FTX named the index after r/Wallstreetbets — the Reddit group thought to be associated with pumping the prices of those assets.
“We're happy to announce that we have launched trading for a basket of Wall Street Bets markets,” FTX said in a public statement on Thursday. The index trades as a futures contract with expiration on March 26, 2021.
When asked if the product is just a short-term offering on FTX, the exchange’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, said it depends. “We'll see,” he told Cointelegraph. “If there's enough demand we'll list Junes!”
Bankman-Fried also explained that the WSB index futures contract is “cash settled vs the index of tokenized share markets on FTX.”
The Wall Street Bets, or WSB, index, officially trading under the ticker WSB-0326, “tracks the price of NOK, BB, AMC, GME, SLV, DOGE, and FTT using a weighed average of their prices,” FTX says in the product’s description on the exchange.
Each asset price holds a weight of 16.5% in the basket, except for FTT, which has a weight of just 1%. Adding the six assets with a weight of 16.5%, and FTT with a weight of 1%, gives a total of 100%.
Over the last several days, the Reddit group known as r/Wallstreetbets has reportedly worked to pump the prices of multiple stocks, including GME and AMC, in light of larger entities’ efforts to short those assets. Yesterday, DOGE also pumped massively in line with chatter from the group.