ByBit to launch Ether futures contract as Bitcoin dominance recedes further

The June contract would be available for trading from May 20 while the September contract would be available from May 24 and traders can hold their positions in these contracts free of charge.

Ethereum has consolidated its position as the second-largest crypto behind bitcoin, over the last few months. This has been helped, in no small deal, by the rapid rise in price which has led to a lot of interest and speculation in the cryptocurrency.

While the rise in the price of bitcoin last year helped to bring in a lot of large investors and institutions into bitcoin, 2021 seems to be the year of ethereum so far. Its supporters have long held that ethereum is a much more usable blockchain on which several applications can be built and a whole community can be built around it while bitcoin has pretty much-limited resources and uses.

But till this year, interest in ethereum was limited to the developer community which continued to plough on in the hope that it would get the recognition that it deserved someday. Those days seem to have arrived now with rapid interest growing in the ethereum blockchain and in the Defi community built around it. This has been accompanied by a rapid price rise.

“As the Bitcoin price continues to stagnate, traders and investors are increasingly looking towards alternatives,” said Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit. “We are pleased to launch our new Ether futures contract as rising retail and institutional demand paves way for a new alt season. Ether futures contract and Bybit Cloud Mining join our existing ETHUSD and ETHUSDT perpetual contracts in the ETH product lineup, and will create new opportunities for our clients, whether they are looking to hedge their positions or to further capitalize on future price movements of ETH.”

Improvements continued to be made in the ethereum protocol which is aimed at reducing the gas fee which seems to be the biggest complaint against its usage at this point with the Berlin upgrade and EIP1559 fee market overhaul expected to reduce the fees drastically.

Bybit had previously announced a Ether Cloud Mining as a service product that helps users to immediately start ether mining and this would also begin on May 24 and is expected to be widely used by miners and normal users alike.

Bybit had recently faced a setback with its UK operations being shut down due to the ban on crypto CFDs there and it would hope that the introduction of these derivatives along with other instruments in the future would help to regain back some of the trading volume and revenue that was lost.