The long awaited Bitcoin futures trading by CME opened hours ago, with a price of over $20k per bitcoin. There are contracts expiring in February, March and June and the price is stable around the $20,000 mark for all of them.
It's interesting to note that, contrarily to what happened during the first futures opening, a week ago, the operator's site didn't crash and the price went even lower than the current index, at some point, until $18,345, but it recovered fast.
At the moment of writing, Bitcoin is not showing any consistent signs of growing, trading flat for $19,085 on Coinmarketcap, but it's still early in the week.
The slowdown of the market may be a sign of health: both futures operators have a clause at which they are closing trading if there is more than 7% increase in price day to day (which was something very normal for Bitcoin). So smaller, but more consistent moves may be expected from institutional investors, which don't want to see big spikes.
Although, relatively modest, I think this is a good sign, especially since alts seem to be a bit disconnected, trading in different directions. STEEM and SBD, for instance, are on a consistent bull run.
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