Coinbase Shares Drop 9% After Report of CME Considering Spot Bitcoin Listing

Thursday morning, Coinbase shares fell almost 8% to $202.49 after the Financial Times said that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) might soon start selling bitcoin on the spot market because customers want it so much. 

Even so, cryptocurrencies went up. In the last 24 hours, the CoinDesk 20 Index, which tracks the 20 biggest digital tokens by market value, went up 0.91%. 

Bitcoin (BTC) went up by 0.5 percent after Wednesday’s inflation report came in better than expected. 

Coinbase shares are up 29% so far this year because the price of cryptocurrencies has gone through the roof since the beginning of the year. 

The Chicago-based CME is the world’s biggest futures exchange and has been around for more than a hundred years. 

It is a major threat to Coinbase, which has been the most trusted cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. until now.

According to U.S. officials, the CME is a “systemically important financial market utility,” which means it is closely watched. 

Many investors also think that the government would step in to stop CME from failing in a financial crisis because of this title. 

Because it has the most open interest in bitcoin contracts in the U.S., CME is already a big player in the market.

The Financial Times cited sources that said CME has been in talks with traders who want to trade bitcoin on a regulated market. 

Traders are very worried about how little trust there is in crypto exchanges, which has been made worse by recent scams involving well-known exchanges like FTX.

Since spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) came out, traders have had a safer way to spend their money. 

Over 500 companies put more than $10 billion into these funds in the first three months after they opened, and individual investors put another $40 billion into them.