TD Ameritrade is to start offering Bitcoin futures via CBOE on Monday, according to Reuters, as the value of a single bitcoin has now reached the preposterous price of $20,000.
Interested customers will have to have a minimum balance of $25,000 in order to trade the contracts, and the margin requirement will be 1.5 times that of CBOE’s Bitcoin futures, according to CNBC News.
CBOE launched the first ever Bitcoin futures contracts last week, in what was seen as a milestone in cryptocurrency/mainstream relations. On the first day of trading, 4,127 of the contracts were traded on the Chicago-based exchange, and the system crashed twice as Bitcoin price spikes tripped circuit breakers that had been pre-set for safety.
The other major exchange in Chicago, CME Group, is to start trading the futures today, and last week we reported that Deutsche Börse is considering launching them too.
TD Ameritrade will not be supporting CME’s Bitcoin futures, at least initially. The Nebraska-based broker is one of the world’s top three according to capital markets research and consulting firm Tabb. As household name companies are beginning to queue up to offer this increasingly valuable asset, a rush of people are buying it, pushing the price up even higher. It has hit $20,000 on exchanges such as Bithumb, bitFlyer, Coinone and BTCC, as of writing.
(Photo: flickr)
