Not a Bitcoin company
CME Group is a derivatives exchange group. Its annual report describes it as a Delaware stock corporation that is the holding company for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Board of Trade of the City of Chicago, the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Commodity Exchange, and its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CME. What it sells is interest rate, equity index, foreign exchange, agricultural, energy and metals contracts, plus a clearing house. Bitcoin is one line in that list, and the entry exists here for that line and nothing else.
What it listed, and when
On 1 December 2017 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission published a statement that CME and the CBOE Futures Exchange had self-certified new contracts for bitcoin futures products, and that the Cantor Exchange had self-certified a bitcoin binary option. Under the Commodity Exchange Act a designated contract market may list a product by certifying to the CFTC that it complies with the Act, which is not the same thing as approval, and the CFTC statement of that day says so.
Trading in the CME contract opened later that month. CME's own announcement of the exact first session could not be opened for this entry, because cmegroup.com refuses automated requests under its data terms of use, and the Internet Archive was offline when this was written. Openable filings give dates a few days apart for the first session. So this entry says December 2017 and stops there. The same block is why no mark ships with this entry: CME publishes its logo only behind that wall, and the directory does not redraw one.
The contract is cash settled. There is no bitcoin in it. It pays out against the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate, a daily US dollar rate compiled from named spot venues, so a buyer takes a price exposure and never touches a key. CME's 2017 annual report lists "a cash-settled bitcoin futures contract" among its product launches of that decade. Options on those futures came two years later: the 2019 annual report states that CME "launched bitcoin options and options on SOFR in January 2020".
What that changed was access rather than anything about Bitcoin. A regulated futures contract let institutions that cannot hold the asset take a position on its price through an infrastructure they already used, and it later gave the Securities and Exchange Commission a surveilled market to point at when it approved futures-based products, which is the thread the DC Circuit picked up in the Grayscale case.
Bitcoin remains small inside the group. The 2025 annual report puts average daily volume in bitcoin futures and options at 101 thousand contracts for 2025, against 68 thousand for 2024, and lists cryptocurrencies as one of six product areas.