High-profile derivatives marketplace Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group is reportedly going to introduce options trading for its micro Bitcoin and Ether futures offerings.

Specifically, the CME Group reportedly revealed that subject to regulatory review, it has plans down its pipeline to roll out options contracts for its current micro Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) futures, which take up 10% of the size of the respective tokens. 

The futures options – with the expected timeline for commencing trading being March 28th – are reportedly rolled out two years following the company’s initial introduction of a BTC options trading product in January two years ago, and over four years since the group released the first Bitcoin futures contract in December 2017.

“Building on the strength and liquidity of the underlying contracts, our micro-sized options will enable traders of all sizes to efficiently hedge market-moving events with greater precision and flexibility or fine-tune their cryptocurrency market exposure” CME Group’s global head of equity and FX products, Tim McCourt, further remarked regarding the development. 

The micro Ether futures contract – released by CME launched in December last year – reportedly comes with the size of 0.1 ETH, while the Bitcoin futures contract is 0.1 BTC, with trading available since May 2021. 

Per the CME Group, the lowest block threshold for options are 10 contracts for micro BTC and 100 for micro ETH. 

Genesis Global Trading, Cumberland, and Akuna Capital are reportedly the entities going to offer liquidity services for the crypto investment instruments. 

The development reportedly surfaced after BTC price experienced an over 15% surge, from the $38,000s to a 7-day high of $44,816.