Owner of New York Stock Exchange may let investors bet on bitcoin

[Vaz0r]

The owner of New York Stock Exchange is talking to other financial forms about the project, noting ‘there is a trend here we can’t ignore’

Los Angeles/New York — Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of New York Stock Exchange, has been working on a trading platform that would let investors bet on bitcoin, according to two people with knowledge of the project.

ICE has held talks with other financial firms about the project, which is still in development, the people said, asking not to be identified because the conversations are confidential. The project could ultimately be aborted. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment.

Wall Street firms began offering clients futures from Cboe Global Markets and CME Group in December, but the financial industry has broadly shied away from selling bitcoin itself. One issue is that virtual currencies can be stolen by hackers, a problem that has arisen before at some major crypto-venues. This means traditional Wall Street firms looking to facilitate investments have to figure out how to hold such assets securely.

ICE may offer swaps to big investors that would end with the buyer owning bitcoin the next day, the New York Times reported earlier on Monday, citing four unidentified people briefed on its efforts. Such contracts would put the trading under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

In an interview last month, ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher declined to rule out offering contracts based on digital currencies. "There is a trend here we can’t ignore, in my mind, so I don’t discount it," he told Bloomberg Television.

Goldman Sachs Group has also been working on expanding the types of contracts available to investors as it prepares to open a bitcoin-trading business. The bank will probably trade bitcoin futures in a principal, market-making capacity and will also create non-deliverable forward products, a person briefed on the decisions said last week.

Source: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/2018-05-08-owner-of-new-york-stock-exchange-may-let-investors-bet-on-bitcoin/