Not everyone's excited about ETH futures rumors

After a week of mostly trading sideways, the world’s second biggest coin jumped 13.4% in the early Tuesday hours, hitting a month-high 180.53 before heading back south.

The rally was triggered by rumours that the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is now ready to consider an Ethereum futures contract. Apparently, an anonymous ‘senior official’ recently told CoinDesk that the Commision can “get comfortable with an ether derivative being under our jurisdiction”.

While he didn’t go into specifics, the CFTC official stressed that there are no inherent obstacles to approving an Ether-based futures contract:

“We don’t do bold pronouncements, what we do is we look at applications before us. A derivatives exchange comes to us and says ‘we want to launch this particular product.’ … If they came to us with a particular derivative that met our requirements, I think that there’s a good chance that it would be [allowed to be] self-certified by us.”

Up until now, the CFTC has sanctioned two Bitcoin futures markets: one by CME Group, and the other by CBOE Global Exchange.

The news was welcomed with open arms by several crypto pundits, even dubbed ‘the biggest development in recent memory’:

Some, however, seemed a bit more timid about the announcement, given how the futures action (or more specifically, futures expiration) impacted the price of Bitcoin in the past:

According to some websites, including Hacked, those worries might be overblown:

“The impact of an Ethereum futures market is unlikely to have to the same earth-shaking effect as its Bitcoin predecessor. However, if the same pattern does play itself out, then the dump that accompanies the pump would make itself felt on all of those ERC20 pairs.”

Back in the present, Ethereum has dropped more than 7% since hitting the local top earlier today, and is currently trading in the $166 range.