Bitcoin in particular has been in the spotlight recently due to the massive fluctuation in its value. With futures, you can "short" the underlying commodity, meaning that you'll make money if the price of bitcoin goes down over a week or month or more, depending on the length of the contract. Whelan thinks that within the year we'll be seeing the launch of more bitcoin investment vehicles, starting with ETFs (exchange traded funds) that track the performance of bitcoin futures, similar to ETFs that track the performance of the S&P 500 or other market indices. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) gave its blessing for bitcoin futures to be traded on two major U.S.-based exchanges: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the CBOE Global Markets Exchange. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is dealing with some major uncertainty after getting hit with a lawsuit from the US’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC. For one thing, it all happened so quickly, with trading opening just weeks after the CFTC announcement. The company offers a discount when clients pay using BNB, which is currently 25% off trading fees and 10% off USDT-margined futures, but the rate varies.

Whelan says that bitcoin mining operations, which are the most obvious audience for bitcoin futures, are still "getting their ducks in a row" in terms of finding brokers and clearinghouses willing to trade this new asset in larger volumes. A drop in the underlying asset price may result in significant losses. In the case of blockchain technology, the asset is a ledger of all bitcoin transactions dating back to the earliest instances. Bitcoin transactions happen through blockchain technology. The bitcoin system groups new transactions into blocks and then issues a challenge to all computers connected to the network: Verify the transactions by solving a difficult math problem. First, the difficulty of the math problem depends directly upon the amount of processing power connected to the network. First, blockchain technologies depend upon peer-to-peer networks. That's why so many different industries are talking about blockchain technology, with some going so far as to suggest it's the next incarnation of the web. That's why Stuff They Don't Want You To Know hosts Ben Bowlin, Noel Brown and Matt Frederick decided to dedicate two episodes of the podcast to discuss cryptocurrencies. Why would Binance US Pro be pending?

The exchange supports two wallets for holding cryptocurrency - Trust Wallet and Binance Chain wallet. Let's begin with the current trends in cryptocurrency exchange. Cryptocurrency was the dream of many hackers because it represented a way for them to exchange money for products and services that was totally anonymous and divorced from a regulatory authority like banks or governments. And in 2009, many people realized that our global banking system is not that stable as it should be - so these people tried to create a way to transfer money which is independent of the existing system. If multiple computers are offering up block verification solutions, the system as a whole will go with whichever chain of blocks is the longest. One of the ingenious elements of the blockchain is that every transaction verification is, in part, based on what has happened before. The blockchain works by recording financial transactions on a shared digital ledger that's encrypted on a peer-to-peer network.

Every computer on the network has access to visit this backlink ledger, which helps prevent anyone from trying to cheat the system by spending the same digital unit of currency more than once. With bitcoin prices surging more than 16-fold over the past year, and many more investors scrambling to get in on the action, many market watchers expected that the debut of bitcoin futures would generate the same heat. Prior to the launch of bitcoin futures, large institutional investors like banks and hedge funds were barred from playing the bitcoin betting game. Bitcoin futures, however, allow these big-pocketed investors to keep their hands clean by not touching the commodity itself, but rather a tightly regulated contract that's one step away. If you step back, though, it makes sense that the Bitcoin futures market would start slow. Second, bitcoin futures give bitcoin owners a way of hedging their bets on the volatile cryptocurrency, which can swerve 30 percent up or down in a single day.