New York-based fintech company trueEX has announced an upcoming release of a regulated derivatives marketplace for digital assets as well as a partnership between their newly created affiliate, True Digital Holdings (TDH), and Blockchain tech company ConsenSys to create a benchmark rate for the price of Ethereum (ETH).
The announcement comes from a press release published today, March 12. TrueEX, which is the first exchange approved by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as a Designated Contract Market (DCM) for swaps, writes that the initial Bitcoin contracts settled in USD will be listed as “trueDigital” on the current trueEX swap platform.
The press release notes that trueEX is still awaiting approval from the CFTC for the contracts.
According to Sunil Hirani, the founder of TDH, the growing crypto marketplace has thus far been lacking the kind of institutional involvement that trueEX will offer:
"Institutional investors and commercial partners are ready for a regulated and liquid marketplace to gain exposure to and hedge these increasingly important digital currencies and commodities, but the marketplace is sorely lacking the necessary foundation, infrastructure and platforms that institutional investors have come to expect in other important markets.”
The partnership between TDH and ConsenSys and the creation of the Ether benchmark rate will go alongside the creation of “the infrastructure needed for the broad adoption of digital assets by the institutional community,” according to the press release. Ethereum is the second largest digital asset by market cap -- Bitcoin as the first -- according to data on CoinMarketCap.
In early December of 2017, CBOE launched the first Bitcoin futures contracts, with CME Group launching the second around a week later.