Introducing Avalanche and Sui Futures

Trading volumes for Avalanche and Sui futures show that market participants require a broader selection of regulated derivatives. The introduction of larger and micro AVAX and SUI contracts meets this demand, offering liquid, centrally cleared risk-management tools for these high-throughput blockchains.

^{*Data between May 4, 2025 – May 15, 2025}

Enhanced trading strategies

The capital efficiencies inherent in these cash-settled contracts allow for the execution of several trading strategies, including:

• Relative value and inter-commodity spreads: Investors can deploy long-short pairs using Avalanche and Sui futures against other high-throughput networks, such as Solana (SOL), or foundational assets like bitcoin and ether. This approach allows traders to isolate specific architectural risks and capture performance divergence driven by network adoption.

• Arbitrage, basis and price discovery: Centrally cleared, cash-settled futures provide a transparent benchmark for basis trading, capturing the spread between spot market prices and the futures curve. By implementing the robust CME CF Reference Rates for final settlement, these instruments support greater market efficiency across digital assets.

Correlations and risk-return profiles

The correlation matrix below measures the relationship between the spot cryptocurrencies daily returns since May 2023.

^{Source: TradingView. Data as of April 30, 2026. Correlation figures are calculated using daily returns.}

AVAX and SUI maintain moderate-to-high correlations with bitcoin (0.70 and 0.61, respectively), suggesting they follow broad market trends yet provide idiosyncratic exposure.

Notable cross-correlations exist between assets with similar functions or structural focuses. For example, AVAX demonstrates a high correlation with smart-contract and high-throughput platform tokens such as ADA (0.75) and SOL (0.75). However, SUI displays lower overall correlations to the broader group, particularly with payment-oriented networks like Lumens (0.46) and XRP (0.49).

While current correlations reflect a market largely influenced by bitcoin and ether, continued adoption of alt-coins is expected to facilitate further decoupling as fundamental protocol distinctions become drivers of price discovery.

The scatter plot below illustrates the annualised returns of these cryptocurrencies against their corresponding risk over the 2020 to 2026 period. This provides a framework for assessing tokens against individual risk appetites, demonstrating the historical trade-off between volatility and gains.

Assets positioned toward the top right of the chart indicate a higher risk-reward profile. Bitcoin occupies the lowest position on the risk-reward spectrum. Ether serves as a midpoint, historically providing higher returns than bitcoin, though accompanied by a corresponding increase in price fluctuations.

AVAX and SUI exhibit distinctly different profiles from this central cluster. AVAX demonstrates the highest annualized risk of the group, paired with more modest historical returns. SUI is positioned in the lower sector, exhibiting high volatility alongside negative historical returns, reflective of its unique market cycle and more recent emergence.

As market participants increasingly differentiate between protocol-specific value drivers, these risk-return profiles may evolve, potentially leading to a more defined separation between the assets.

Conclusion

The introduction of Avalanche and Sui futures reflects the ongoing maturation of the digital asset market and the resulting demand for targeted risk management. As capital allocation broadens across high-throughput Layer-1 protocols, market participants require reliable instruments to isolate specific risks and execute distinct relative-value strategies. By listing these futures within a centrally cleared, cash-settled environment, we provide the regulated framework necessary to navigate these shifts. Ultimately, these new contracts equip traders with capital efficiency and transparent price discovery, enabling more precise exposure management across an increasingly diverse cryptocurrency landscape.

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