Crypto Facilities, which is a UK based crypto futures exchange, recently announced that they will be launching Litecoin (LTC) derivatives contracts that will go live on Friday, June 20. According to the official source, new US dollar denominated contracts will be offering both long and short trading terms to the users. These come with weekly, monthly and quarterly maturities.
As reported, the contracts will now have Litecoin as their underlying collateral while on other similar exchangers such as e.g. CME or CBOE the contracts have the already existing Bitcoin (BTC) futures.
The CEO of Crypto Facilities, Timo Schlaefer commented on the development stating that the decision on the new cooperation was made based on as measurable demand from their clients. “We believe our LTC-dollar futures contracts will increase price transparency, liquidity and efficiency in the cryptocurrency markets”, continued Schlaefer.
A month before the launch of LTC futures, Crypto Facilities announced about offering Ethereum (ETH) futures contracts to investors together with already existing crypto derivatives which are all based on Ripple and Bitcoin. The earlier announcement was made after U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission officially commented that “Ethereum will not be regulated as a security under U.S. law”.
Back on June 13, researchers of University of Texas published a paper which stated that recent transaction patterns indicate that US dollar back cryptocurrency Tether is being used in order to show price support and manipulate prices. This, as a result, artificially deflates Bitcoin’s price, in order to maximize short-term returns on futures contracts.
There were however further reports earlier this month stating that U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is conducting own investigation into possible price manipulation on Bitcoin futures markets, and as a part of this investigation they are probing major U.S. cryptocurrency exchanges.
