The bitcoin reaches $ 18,000

The controversial queen of virtual currencies, made a triumphant debut on the international financial market on Sunday, easily exceeding $ 18,000 per unit and increased the concern of some investors to the risk of a bubble.

Under the "XBT" symbol and with a price of $ 15,000, one of the first financial products that allow betting on the future price of this virtual currency came out at 11.00pm GMT to the Chicago board options exchange (Cboe), one of the two platforms of negotiation of this type of contracts in the United States.

It started with volatility and heavy traffic that made the Cboe website inaccessible for the first twenty minutes. The stock exchange operator assured, however, that the operations were not affected and will close its first day on Monday at 9:15 p.m. GMT.

Towards 03H20 GMT, the virtual currency soared to $ 17,750 per unit for the future contract expected for January 17, thus exceeding its maximum reached in alternative internet platforms where it has been negotiated so far without any regulation. In the Cboe came to rise to 18,010 dollars.

A futures contract is a financial product that allows investors to bet on the evolution of a currency, that is, whether its price will rise or fall.

These instruments constitute the first official opportunity for professional investors to invest in Bitcoin, created in 2009 and which some distrust due to its lack of regulation and lack of transparency, which has made it a popular asset among criminals and traffickers they want to launder money.

Cboe "gives it legitimacy because it recognizes that bitcoin is an asset like any other (the dollar, euro, oil, gas, soybean) that can be exchanged," explains Nick Colas, an expert in Data Trek Research.

The debut of the virtual currency in a large international market was "fairly calm and stable," Bob Fitzsimmons, head of future contracts at Wedbusch Securities, told AFP.

In the first four and a half hours, 1,694 operations were registered, the Cboe reported, stating that "the exchanges are taking place as planned."

The exchanges are exclusively electronic. Without physical existence, bitcoin is based on a person-to-person payment system based on blockchain technology.

It divides economists, big capitals and financiers, but it has echoed in countries excluded from the US financial system such as Venezuela or with high inflation and deflation.

This enthusiasm has recently spread to Western countries, where the shares of listed companies are very expensive, which pushes some investors and small savers to look for other financial products.

However, Jamie Dimon, executive director of the US bank JPMorgan Chase, says that this instrument is a "scam". And a "speculative bubble" that probably "implodes," in the opinion of Nobel Prize laureates in economics Joseph Stiglitz and Jean Tirolle.

These warnings, according to AFP sources close to the entities, were reflected on Sunday in the absence of a large number of banks: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and Barclays decided at the moment not to be intermediaries of their clients (investment funds, private equity firms) that wish to invest in bitcoin products.

Only Goldman Sachs and ABN Amro agreed to intermediate for a certain number of clients to minimize the risks associated with bitcoin volatility, they told AFP.

The futures market can only be accessed through large banks and authorized brokerage agencies, which agree to pay investors the money they owe them. They are exposed to significant risks if their customers can not pay.

To avoid unpleasant surprises, Wedbush Securities decided to increase the margins and guarantee deposits required from its customers.

"We have made sure that our customers and our company are properly protected," says Fitzsimmons.

In addition to the Cboe, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), another global exchange operator, will launch bitcoin exchanges on December 18 and it is expected that in 2018 it will be followed by Nasdaq, the platform on which the giants of Silicon Valley, such as Google, operate. Facebook.

The attraction of bitcoin is such that hackers recently stole bitcoins for almost 60 million dollars from the Slovenian platform NiceHash.

source: afp