The Brazilian Stock Exchange will launch Bitcoin and Ethereum futures

cointelegraph.com:

B3, the Brazilian Stock Exchange, confirmed that within six months it intends to launch its first official product aimed at the cryptocurrency market — Bitcoin (BTC) futures trading. The group's chief financial officer, André Milanez, made the announcement during a conference call on Monday.

Milanez did not provide many details on how the product will work. It is not yet known if B3 will form a partnership or if it will offer Bitcoin futures trading directly, but the timeline for launching this product was stated to be relatively short. "We plan to launch bitcoin futures in the next three to six months," he said.

Currently, in Brazil, institutional and retail investors can trade 11 ETFs through B3 with exposure to cryptocurrencies, including CRPT11 from Empiricus with Vitreo; the NFTS11 of Investo; QBTC11, QETH11 and QDFI11 all from QR Assets and META11, HASH11, BITH11, ETHE11, DEFI11, WEB311 all from Hashdex. In addition, in Brazil, there are more than 25 investment funds approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) that offer different types of exposure to the crypto-assets market.

In January Jochen Mielke de Lima, director of information technology at B3, had already said that the Brazilian stock exchange would launch several products with exposure to cryptocurrencies in 2022, including Bitcoin futures and Ethereum (ETH) futures

At the time, the executive highlighted that the Brazilian stock exchange had been looking closely at the cryptocurrency market from a technological point of view since 2016.

According to the statement, B3 only needed to settle the question on whether the negotiations would be carried out against the U.S. dollar or against the Brazilian real. Futures contracts need a reference index, so