HONG KONG — Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, began trading a new set of cryptocurrency futures tied to CoinDesk benchmarks earlier this week with plans to bring onchain interest rates into regulated markets next.

The contracts went live on Monday after being announced Jan. 9, ICE said, offering cash-settled, U.S. dollar denominated futures linked to seven CoinDesk indices.

That includes broad-market products tied to the CoinDesk 20 and CoinDesk 5 indices, alongside single-asset futures tracking bitcoin, ether, solana, XRP and BNB.

Because they settle in dollars rather than delivering tokens, the products are aimed at institutions that want price exposure without the operational and custody friction of spot crypto.

Up next is ICE’s stated plan to list One Month CoinDesk Overnight Rates USDC futures, subject to regulatory review, the companies said in a press release.

These products are designed to reflect the annualized effective interest rate paid by borrowers in decentralized finance markets, a crypto-native analogue to the way traditional markets trade expectations around overnight benchmarks such as SOFR — which serves as a reference interest rate that helps financial experts price loans and other dollar-based financial products.

Such rates products shift the conversation toward crypto as a funding and credit market, where traders can express views on borrowing costs and liquidity conditions rather than only whether bitcoin goes up or down.

ICE also pointed to the scale already built around CoinDesk indices, saying tens of billions of dollars are tied to the benchmarks. The CoinDesk 20, ICE said, is designed to represent most of the digital asset market through a capped market-cap weighted methodology.