OKEx Announces Options Trading While CME Starts Testing Theirs

Major cryptocurrency exchange OKEx announced the upcoming launch of its Options Trading. This move comes ahead of CME’s Bitcoin (BTC) futures contracts, the testing of which started today.

OKEx promised to launch options trading on December 27, offering both buy and write options. “Developed from the ground up, OKEx Options represents a complete upgrade to the platform’s trading architecture, backed by a faster, more stable and robust infrastructure,” the exchange said in a press release. They claim to be the first crypto exchange to offer C2C (customer to customer), spot, futures, perpetual swap, and options trading at one place.

OKEx Options come with an anti-manipulation system, the exchange said, as it’s designed to prevent close price manipulation with the exchange averaging out the spot data from multiple platforms to obtain a fair settlement price. Additionally, the options mark price is determined by OKEx in real time using the Black-Scholes pricing model.

Before that, the users are invited to sign up for the ‘Simulation Trading Contest’ which starts on December 12 and ends of December 23. According to the rules, each participant can get a simulation fund of “BTC 10” to join the options trading simulation. The participants will be ranked by their profit rates, with only the top 300 displayed. In total, contestants up to the 100th place will share rewards up to USDT 150,000.

Meanwhile, as reported , the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group), a major financial derivatives marketplace, said that the options on its Bitcoin futures contracts will be available for trading starting with January 13 2020, under the condition that the regulators give it a green light. This came after CME Group said that it plans to double its monthly Bitcoin futures trading cap to BTC 10,000 and that it asked the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for a regulatory permission.

OKEx announcement also comes on the day when testing for new release opens on trading system CME Globex in the New Release test environment starting today, December 9. “Our new options contract will allow for additional opportunities to hedge bitcoin price risk and futures positions in the new year,” they added, highlighting three benefits of the upcoming option: greater capital efficiency, counterparty risk mitigation, and regulated reference rate.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin is currently (10:53 UTC) trading at USD 7,493, after dropping 0.45% in the past day, but rising 1.89% in the past week.
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Learn more: How to Bet on Bitcoin Volatility Using Bitcoin Options