Investing.com - Cryptocurrencies saw little change on Wednesday morning in Asia amidst news that the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange plans to launch a futures contract tracking bitcoin in December.
Bitcoin slipped 0.28% to $6546.5 at 11:07PM ET (03:07 GMT) on the Bitifinex exchange.
Ethereum also inched down 0.31% to $206.2 on the Bitifinex exchange.
XRP edged up 1.5% to $0.46892 on the Poloniex exchange, while Litecoin went up 0.32% to 53.479 on the Bitifinex exchange.
The Intercontinental Exchange released a notice on Tuesday about the debut of a bitcoin futures on Dec. 12 this year, after almost a year after CBOE and CME.
The Bakkt Bitcoin Daily Futures contract “calls for delivery of one bitcoin held in the Bakkt Digital Asset Warehouse, and will trade in U.S. dollar terms,” according to the notice. Minimum price movement for each bitcoin is $2.5.
Separately, Coinbase and Circle, two of the largest digital token companies, partnered on Tuesday to establish a joint venture, named Centre Consortium, which supports Coinbase’s launch of USD Coin (USDC). USDC is backed by the U.S. dollar held in accounts.
“Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, a USDC is meant to represent a single US dollar that does not move up or down relative to its reference currency. One USDC is a 1:1 representation of a US dollar on the Ethereum blockchain,” said Coinbase on its blog.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allair told CNBC that investors will rely on government-backed money and it just needs to be able to operate on the same blockchain technology.
Japan’s SBI Group also joined the cryptocurrency bandwagon. The financial services giant partnered with Denmark-based startup, Sepior on Monday to develop a digital wallet for SBI’s cryptocurrency exchange platform, VCTRADE. The platform was launched in June as the country’s first bank-backed digital currency exchange with a government’s license.
Better security of digital currency is needed as over $1.6 billion in today’s value was lost from cyber-attacks, mostly related to insufficient key security, since 2014, according to Sepior’s press release.