NEW YORK • The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) will from Sunday offer investors the option to trade bitcoin, giving the pioneer cryptocurrency further mainstream recognition.

Operations will begin at the opening of the electronic financial market at 8pm in New York (8am Singapore time, Monday).

Brokers will then be allowed to trade futures contracts on one of the Intercontinental Exchange's (ICE) platforms, by betting on increases or decreases in the currency's value, just as with oil or gold. The cryptocurrency has been trading at around US$10,000 per bitcoin.

ICE's virtual currency subsidiary, Bakkt, will lead the operation. Launched in August last year, Bakkt was supposed to begin trading last November but the project was delayed.

It was already possible to buy and sell bitcoin directly on multiple smaller platforms, but those lacked the historic and official legitimacy of the ICE.

Another major stock exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), has since the end of 2017 offered trading in cryptocurrency futures.

About 7,000 such futures have been traded per day since the beginning of the year, worth a total of more than US$350 million (S$482 million) per day, at the current value.

When the CME's futures contracts expire, clients receive the dollar equivalent of the bitcoin value.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE