The open interest on Bitcoin rose by a “record” 643 contracts on a single day, reported CME on twitter. This was a new all-time high established by the platform amounting to 5,311 contracts on June 17th.

Open interest is the total number of outstanding contracts that have not been settled for an asset. Open interest is of importance as it provides a more accurate picture of the options trading activity regarding whether money flows into the futures market are increasing or decreasing.

This is certainly a very bullish sign for Bitcoin as open interest continues to make new all-time highs and an increasing open interest represents new money coming into the market.

Each of the bitcoin contracts on CME equals 5 BTC and on Monday, 26,555 equivalent bitcoin registered a notional value of approximately $250 million.

“CME Bitcoin futures (BTC) shows growing signs of institutional interest,” said CME.

This uptrend is all thanks to the surging Bitcoin price. On June 17th that recorded a new peak in Bitcoin open interest, BTC/USD went above $7,400.

The leading cryptocurrency is enjoying a bullish momentum as we make new 2019 highs. Till date, BTC is up 146 percent in 2019 while currently trading at $9,115 with 24 hours gains of 0.93 percent.

Decent quarterly expiry coming up next week – current open interests of the main derivatives products:

CME June futures – 16,315 bitcoin contracts ~ $150mln

Bitmex June futures – 7,340 bitcoin contracts ~ $67.5mln

Deribit June options – 29,912 bitcoin options ~ $275mln pic.twitter.com/lyr0GzZMGl

— skew (@skewdotcom) June 19, 2019

Last month, Bitwise released a report on Bitcoin trading volume that revealed about 95 percent of the volume recorded by exchanges is fake. However, it reported that the regulated Bitcoin futures market is “substantially larger” in comparison to the BTC spot market.

With the real bitcoin spot market as the denominator, in April, it was 48% the size of the spot market. Even more interesting is that in comparison to individual exchanges, the CME would rank as the largest exchange:

“ahead of Binance and more than twice as large as the third largest exchange, Bitfinex.”

The size of this market is of critical importance as well because it has been identified as one of the factors that is considered in evaluating a Bitcoin ETF proposal for listing.

Bitcoin’s price is $31,904.57 BTC/USD exchange rate today. The real-time BTC market cap of $593.17 Billion currently ranks #1 with a chart dominance at 62.37%, daily trading volume of $19.16 Billion and live coin value change of BTC -8.79 in the last 24 hours.