The London Stock Exchange Group's clearing house arm named LCH announced services to clear cash-settled Bitcoin (BTC) index-based futures and options. It will do this through a separate service LCH DigitalAssetClear and the trades will be finalized on GFO-X, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange. Frank Soussan, the head of LCH DigitalAssetClear said that there is an increasing rate of interest among the institutional market looking for regulated means for access into Bitcoin.

Clearinghouses are recognized by global financial regulators to reduce the risk posed by bilateral agreement of investment banks and other parties. This is the latest attempt from traditional finance to enter the Crypto space. In march SGE (Stuttgart stock exchange) was awarded a crypto custody license by the prominent German regulator BaFin and in the near future the Brussels based clearinghouse Euroclear intends to launch a bond settlement platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT).

The move seems to indicate the increasing recognition of the value in Bitcoin and other crypto assets by large traditional financial players and the growing demand to access them in a regulated setting. The functional and beneficial nature of digital assets is becoming more and more visible and even though not everyone is ready to recognize the capacity of crypto assets and their impact, the financial world is gradually changing by embracing digital assets.



Other News from Today