HONG KONG — Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, began trading a new set of cryptocurrency futures contracts linked to CoinDesk benchmarks earlier this week with plans to subsequently introduce on-chain interest rates to regulated markets.
The contracts went live Monday after being announced on Jan. 9, ICE said, offering cash-settled, U.S. dollar-denominated futures contracts tied to seven CoinDesk indexes.
This includes broad-market products linked to the CoinDesk 20 and CoinDesk 5 indices, as well as single-asset futures tracking bitcoin, ether, solana, XRP and BNB.
Because they settle in dollars rather than delivering tokens, the products are aimed at institutions that want price exposure without the operational and custodial frictions of spot cryptocurrencies.
Next up is ICE’s stated plan to list USDC futures contracts on one-month CoinDesk overnight rates, subject to regulatory review, the companies said in a press release.
These products are designed to reflect the annualized effective interest rate paid by borrowers in decentralized financial markets, a crypto-native analogue of how traditional markets trade expectations around day-to-day benchmarks such as SOFR – which serves as a benchmark interest rate that helps financial experts evaluate loans and other dollar-based financial products.
Such rates products shift the conversation to crypto as a funding and credit market, where traders can express their views on borrowing costs and liquidity conditions rather than just whether bitcoin will rise or fall.
ICE also highlighted the scale already built around CoinDesk indices, saying tens of billions of dollars are tied to the benchmarks. The CoinDesk 20, ICE said, is designed to represent the majority of the digital asset market through a capped market cap-weighted methodology.
