A United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) senior official has told CoinDesk that the regulatory body is willing to give Ethereum the green light for an Ethereum futures contract, should it meet the necessary criteria.
The official, in his conversation with CoinDesk, said that the regulators look at each application and, if it meets the criteria, there is no reason for it not to be approved,
I think we can get comfortable with an ether derivative being under our jurisdiction. We don’t do bold pronouncements, what we do is we look at applications before us. A derivatives exchange comes to us and says ‘we want to launch this particular product.’ … If they came to us with a particular derivative that met our requirements, I think that there’s a good chance that it would be [allowed to be] self-certified by us.
The CFTC, as it is well known, has already approved of bitcoin futures, with CME and CBOE offering such contracts. It had begun requesting feedback on Ethereum last year, knowing that bitcoin and Ethereum were two distinct entities that had to be approached differently.
CFTC Chairman, Christopher Giancarlo, who has spoken about crypto in front of the United States Senate before, has made statements that suggest he is in favour of crypto – while not wishing for stringent regulation that might stifle innovation.
The buzz coming out of the CFTC means that more good news, as far as regulation is concerned, could be around the corner. The influx of institutional investment, which PwC and Morgan Stanley have predicted, from futures contracts and through services like Bakkt could usher in a greater number of average investors as well, making predictions of bull markets a little more believable.
At the time of publishing, Ethereum’s (ETH) price hovers around $178.
