Seeing bitcoin trade alongside, gold, eurodollar, tbills, and S&P brings bitcoin into the mainstream. It will allow millions of new investors to access the alternatve digital asset class through their banks and brokers. There will be new risks including market manipulation risks.
These futures are cash settled. There is no actual delivery of bitcoin. If volume on the futures becomes larger than the bitcoin exchanges, market manipulation will be a risk.
Example: I buy 10000 January 2018 bitcoin futures. Minutes before expiry, I see that the market depth on one of the reference exchanges is thin. I hit the exchange with “buy at market” orders for 3000 bitcoin. The price shoots up from $10’000 to $1 million. Now the sellers of the future will need to pay me out in CASH, based on the photograph of that price.
Of course the market-makers will screw me over if I do that. They will say it’s a repetition of what the Hunt brothers did. They were the “Silver Bulls” who bought up all the physical supply of silver while being long the futures. The price of silver crashed after new rules were brought in to stop them rolling all their contracts. They became forced sellers.
Below you can see the CME announcement from http://www.cmegroup.com/media-room/press-releases/2017/10/31/cme_group_announceslaunchofbitcoinfutures.html