Bitcoin Cash: all 81 futures markets are perpetuals, CME is missing

Bitcoin Cash costs $294.31 on Wednesday morning, or 264.53 euros. The coin sits 4.4 percent above its level of 24 hours ago and 3.9 percent above its level of a week ago, according to CoinGecko in the night before October 28 at around 2am. That is a rarity this week: Bitcoin has given up 2.7 percent over the same period, Ether 4.3 percent. Anyone wanting the medium-term picture will find our running assessment in the Bitcoin Cash price prediction.

More interesting than the price this week, though, is where Bitcoin Cash is actually traded. Since October 19 there has been a futures contract at the CME in Chicago, so at a regulated US futures exchange. A count of the publicly visible futures markets shows, however, that this contract does not appear in the statistics most investors rely on. There, 81 Bitcoin Cash markets are listed, and every single one of them is a perpetual, meaning a contract with no expiry date.

Bitcoin Cash holds $294 and closes the week as one of the few top-25 assets in the green

The weekly high is $295.76, reached in the night before Wednesday, and the weekly low $269.97 on Saturday evening. The current price is therefore 0.8 percent below the weekly high and 8.7 percent above the weekly low. Over two weeks there is a gain of 7.4 percent, over 30 days a loss of 11.4 percent. Market capitalization is $5.92 billion, which puts Bitcoin Cash in 21st place among all cryptocurrencies. In circulation are 20.11 million of a maximum 21 million BCH.

Daily turnover on the spot market is $213.8 million. That figure is worth a second look, because it is small compared with the futures markets. Open futures positions on Bitcoin Cash alone add up to more than a billion dollars, and turnover there runs at $825.3 million in 24 hours. For every dollar of spot turnover there are therefore almost four dollars of futures turnover. For price formation that means what happens in the chart arises to a considerable degree where trading is leveraged, not where coins change hands.

81 contracts, 63 exchanges, not one expiry date: the count of October 28

For this article we counted the publicly visible futures markets. The basis is CoinGecko's derivatives data, and 28,099 contracts across all cryptocurrencies were examined. Of those, 81 relate to Bitcoin Cash, spread across 63 trading venues. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on October 28, 2026.

The result in figures: open positions across these 81 markets add up to $1.066 billion. Turnover over the past 24 hours is $825.3 million. And the finding that brought us to this article: all 81 contracts are perpetuals. Not one dated future is included in this list.

That is remarkable because it makes the regulated part of the market invisible. The CME trades Bitcoin Cash in two sizes, a standard contract over 250 BCH and a micro contract over 25 BCH. Both have an expiry date. In the overview an investor finds when searching for open interest on Bitcoin Cash, they do not show up.

What separates a perpetual from a dated future

A future is a contract to buy or sell an asset at a fixed date in the future. That date is the expiry, and settlement happens on it. A perpetual future, perpetual for short, is a futures contract with no expiry date: the position runs on as long as it is collateralized, and ends only when it is closed or liquidated.

To stop the price of such a contract drifting away from the spot price, there is the funding rate. This is a payment that flows at fixed intervals between holders of long and short positions. If the contract trades above spot, longs pay shorts; in the opposite case the other way round. For you as a holder that is a running fee or income with nothing to do with price movement.

This difference is no technical detail for European investors. Under European supervisory practice, perpetuals fall into the area of contracts for difference, and there leverage caps apply to retail clients that sit far below what international platforms offer. We have described the classification of perpetuals under the CFD rules in detail. To compare the products, the authorized platforms are in our comparison of the best perp DEXs.

Why the CME future of October 19 is missing from the statistics

The CME announced the launch of the Bitcoin Cash contracts on September 22 and carried it out on October 19. The first block trades in both contracts went through the trading houses FalconX and GSR, according to market reports. With that step the exchange lists eleven contracts on individual cryptocurrencies, up from nine. How the price behaved beforehand we described at the CME launch on October 19.

That the contract does not appear in the usual overviews has a plain reason: those overviews collect the data of crypto exchanges. The CME is not one of them, because it is a futures exchange for commodities, interest rates and currencies. The CME's figures sit in its own publications. For you a practical rule follows: an open interest figure on Bitcoin Cash that you read somewhere very probably describes only the unregulated part of the market.

This is no marginal issue. If you read a figure such as the $1.066 billion cited here as a measure of the entire futures market, you are not overstating the share of highly leveraged speculation; you are understating the share of regulated trading. Reading both together is the cleaner route.

A single platform carries half of the open interest

The distribution of the $1.066 billion across the 63 trading venues is uneven. The largest venue, the exchange Tapbit, accounts for $538.4 million and thus 50.5 percent of the total. The second largest is Binance with $98.0 million, or 9.2 percent. The three largest venues together carry 65.1 percent. Subtract the largest venue and $527.3 million is left for all the remaining 62 venues combined.

What that means is worth a sober look. A metric that comes half from a single trading venue does not measure the mood of the overall market; to a considerable degree it measures the positioning of that one venue's customers. If something shifts there, the overall figure shifts, without anything having changed at the other 62 venues. We observed the same distortion with Monero in October, where a single exchange carried the bulk of the reported sum.

No statement about the quality or reliability of individual platforms is bound up with this. The figures describe where open positions are reported, not how well a provider works.

Funding rate: in 60 of 81 markets the longs pay

At the time of the count, the funding rates of the 81 markets are positive in 60 cases, negative in 15, and the rest stand at zero. The median value is plus 0.0061 percent per settlement period. Positive means whoever bets on rising prices pays the other side.

That fits the price picture of this week. Bitcoin Cash has risen, the majority of leveraged positions point upwards, and that majority is paying for its stance. The amounts sound small but they add up: with settlement every eight hours, 0.0061 percent comes to roughly two percent over a year that a long position has to earn before it is even in profit. For short holding periods that is negligible; for a position left open for weeks it is not.

The range is wide. The lowest value is minus 0.1 percent, the highest plus 0.0229 percent. Anyone comparing several platforms will indeed find differences that decide the cost of holding.

Leverage and liquidation: what happens to your position without an expiry date

A contract with no expiry date spares you a decision that a future forces on you. With a dated contract the day of settlement comes, whether it suits you or not. With a perpetual that day does not exist, and so in practice the position often ends by the other route: through liquidation.

Liquidation means the platform closes your position by force because the collateral posted no longer suffices. How far the price has to run for that depends on the leverage. At tenfold leverage a move of about ten percent against you is enough, at twentyfold about five percent. For context: the range between the weekly high and the weekly low for Bitcoin Cash over the past seven days was 9.6 percent. One week of normal swings would therefore already have cost a tenfold leveraged position.

In practice that means: note the liquidation price of your open positions before you do anything else, and compare it with the weekly low of $269.97. If it sits above that, the past week would have been enough. Check as well which funding rate your platform settles and at what interval, because those costs run on regardless of the price.

The buying route: MiCA authorization, holding period and custody

If you want to hold Bitcoin Cash rather than leverage it, three points decide. First the trading venue: since MiCA, providers addressing retail clients in the EU must hold an authorization as a crypto-asset service provider. Which platforms carry that authorization and what trading there costs is in our overview of the best crypto exchanges.

Second, tax. Under current law in Germany, gains from selling crypto assets stay tax-free if more than a year lies between purchase and sale. The exemption threshold for gains within that period is 1,000 euros. Important for futures trading: this holding period applies to the coins themselves. Gains from perpetuals and other contracts for difference do not fall under it and are treated differently for tax. Anyone doing both keeps the positions separate and documents them cleanly, which is what the tax tools and portfolio trackers are for.

Third, custody. Coins sitting on an exchange belong to you economically but lie at the provider's disposal. For holdings you want to keep longer, self-custody is the safer route, and the choice of devices is in the hardware wallet comparison.

Levels above and below

On the upside the weekly high of $295.76 is the next level to watch, and just above it the round $300 mark. Above that begins the area where the price traded before the setback in early October. On the downside the weekly low of $269.97 is the first level, and below it the round $250 mark.

These are observation points and not price targets. The levels say nothing about where the price is heading, only where something was decided over the past week. The distance between the two is around 9.6 percent, and that range is what you should reckon with when choosing leverage.

What is coming over the next weeks

One date is open: on September 11, Grayscale filed an updated registration with the US securities regulator to convert the existing Bitcoin Cash Trust into a spot ETF on NYSE Arca. No decision date is named in the public documents, and no decision has been taken so far. What a conversion would mean for investors we set out at the Grayscale ETF filing.

For the futures market: the CME publishes its turnover and open positions on an ongoing basis in its own reports. Anyone wanting to know how strongly regulated trading in Bitcoin Cash is actually taken up will find the figures there and not in the crypto exchange overviews.

Bitcoin Cash: the CME future is missing from every open interest figure

The position in one sentence: in the publicly visible overviews, futures trading in Bitcoin Cash runs entirely through contracts with no expiry date, half of the reported sum hangs on a single trading venue, and the contract regulated since October 19 does not appear in those figures. Three steps follow from that:

1. Check open leveraged positions against the weekly low. Compare the liquidation price of every open position with $269.97 and add the funding costs for your planned holding period. Which platforms are authorized for retail clients in the EU and what leverage they offer is in the perp DEX comparison.
2. Read open interest figures with their source from now on. Ask of every figure which trading venues it contains. If the CME is missing, it describes the unregulated part. For a spot purchase without leverage, an authorized exchange from our exchange overview is enough.
3. Keep holdings and speculation apart. Keep the coins you want to hold longer separate from leveraged positions, and hold them in your own custody. The devices for that are in the hardware wallet comparison.

The primary sources for this article: the CME Group announcement of September 22, 2026 and the report on the trading launch of October 19.

(As of October 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)