Bitcoin futures at 5 BTC per contract: what to watch on margin and the expiry date

A Bitcoin future is a bet on a price at a fixed date, and it is not Bitcoin. You buy no coins; you enter a contract. On a set day, the difference between your entry price and the settlement price is paid out. Grasp that and you grasp the rest of this article, because every further term hangs on those two sentences.

What counts here is less the price forecasts than contract size, margin and the expiry date. At the CME Group, the standard contract on Bitcoin covers five coins. At a price of $82,230, the level on Friday morning according to CoinGecko, a single one of those contracts carries a notional value of $411,150. That is the amount you command, not the amount you deposit. Everything instructive and everything dangerous about futures sits in that gap.

What a Bitcoin future is: a forward contract with a fixed expiry date

A future is a standardised contract between two parties over a given quantity of an underlying at a set point in time. Standardised means that quantity, term, settlement method and price steps are written in the exchange's contract specifications and are the same for everyone. Your counterparty stays anonymous: you trade through an exchange backed by a clearing house that guarantees performance to both sides.

The difference from buying on a spot exchange is fundamental. Buy on the spot market and the coin changes hands, after which it sits in your wallet or in the provider's custody. With a future, nothing changes hands. An obligation arises that is settled in money at the end. That is also why you can bet on falling prices with a future without owning coins first: you sell the contract before you have bought it, and the exchange settles the difference.

This difference has consequences well beyond the mechanics. A future gives you no coins, so no wallet, no keys and no way to hold the position yourself. Nor does it give you a claim on a fork or a distribution if something happens on the network. What it gives you is a price and a date.

Contract size: 5 Bitcoin at the CME, 1 Bitcoin at Eurex

Contract size is the most important number that beginners overlook. It determines how much movement a price step sets off in your account, and it separates the venues sharply.

At the CME Group there are three sizes on Bitcoin, according to the exchange. The standard contract covers five coins. The micro contract covers one tenth of a coin. The Bitcoin Friday contract covers one fiftieth of a coin, or 0.02 units.

Eurex in Frankfurt takes a different route. Its futures reference an index from FTSE Russell rather than the coin directly. The standard contract on the FTSE Bitcoin Index trades at one euro, or one dollar, per index point and therefore corresponds to one Bitcoin, according to the exchange. The nano contract trades at one hundredth of a dollar per index point and corresponds to one hundredth of a Bitcoin. The nano variant and the options on the iShares Bitcoin ETP launched on May 5, 2025, according to Eurex.

For you, that means the same price move hits your account at these venues on entirely different scales. A one-dollar rise is worth five dollars on the CME standard contract and one cent on the Eurex nano contract.

What one contract ties up in notional value at $82,230

Notional value is the value of the underlying your contract references. It is not your stake but the sum your position moves in the market. At Friday morning's price, the picture looks like this.

The five contract sizes at a glance

• CME Bitcoin futures, five coins: around $411,150
• Eurex FTSE Bitcoin Index futures, one coin: around $82,230
• CME micro Bitcoin futures, one tenth of a coin: around $8,223
• CME Bitcoin Friday futures, one fiftieth of a coin: around $1,645
• Eurex nano FTSE Bitcoin Index futures, one hundredth of a coin: around $822

The span between the largest and the smallest unit is a factor of 500. That is calculated with the price of $82,230 and the contract sizes published by CME and Eurex; if the price rises or falls, all five values shift in the same proportion. The small contracts are the reason the futures market became interesting to private investors at all. Before them, the entry ticket was a six-figure notional value.

Cash settlement: why no Bitcoin ever lands in your account

Cash settlement means that at the end of the term no underlying is delivered and only the price difference is settled in money. Every CME and Eurex contract named here is built that way, according to the exchanges.

Settlement needs a price both sides can rely on. The CME uses the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate, or BRR. That is a reference price formed from trades across several venues, so that no single venue can shift the outcome. Under the exchange's contract specifications, the final settlement price is the BRR published at 4pm London time on the last trading day. The Bitcoin Friday contract uses a New York variant of that reference rate and settles at 4pm New York time.

The practical point: a future lets you take the price move with you, but you build no holding with it. If you want to own coins, you buy them at one of the regulated crypto exchanges and hold them. If you only want the price move, you take the contract. Confusing the two is the most common beginner's mistake in the futures market.

Initial margin and variation margin: the money that moves daily

Margin is the collateral you lodge with the exchange so that you may hold a contract. It splits into two parts, and confusing those two parts costs money in the futures market on a regular basis.

Initial margin is the amount you have to post on opening. Variation margin is the daily settlement: each evening the clearing house values all open positions at the current price and debits or credits the same day's profit or loss. The procedure is called mark-to-market. It means a loss on a future leaves your account on the evening of the same day, long before the expiry date.

How high these amounts run is set by the exchange and the clearing house, and they change the rates when the market turns choppier. That is precisely why this article names no percentage: any figure printed here would already be wrong in a volatile week. The applicable rates are in your broker's documents, and that is where they belong, read before the first order.

Leverage comes out of the margin, not out of a switch

A futures contract has no leverage slider you push from five to twenty. Leverage is a result, not a setting: it is the ratio between the notional value of your position and the money you have to lodge against it. Post one tenth of that sum for a contract with $82,230 of notional value and you carry tenfold leverage, whether you call it that or not.

The uncomfortable side follows from the same arithmetic. If the price moves one percent against you, tenfold leverage costs you ten percent of your collateral. With an underlying that runs a range of several percent in a single day, that is not the exception but the everyday case. Leverage does not improve your hit rate, only the amount per hit and per miss.

The second point is overlooked even more often: leverage changes by itself. If your position runs into profit, your balance grows and leverage falls. If it runs into loss, the balance shrinks and leverage rises, although you have done nothing. A position therefore becomes riskier at precisely the moment it is already losing.

Liquidation and the duty to top up: what happens with too little margin

If your account falls below the required collateral, you get a margin call: a demand to add money. If the money does not come, or there is no time, the broker closes the position at whatever the market price is then. That is liquidation, and it does not ask whether the price would have come back two hours later.

One difference from many crypto venues matters here and is rarely stated plainly. At a futures exchange, liquidation is not necessarily the end of your obligation. If the proceeds do not cover the loss, a claim against you remains. Whether, and to what extent, your broker contractually excludes such a duty to top up is in its terms, and it is one of the few details everyone really should read before opening an account.

The expiry date: last Friday of the month, 4pm London time

Every future has an end, and for CME Bitcoin contracts it falls, under the exchange's contract specifications, on the last Friday of the contract month at 4pm London time. If that Friday is a business day in neither the United Kingdom nor the United States, trading closes on the preceding day that is a business day in one of the two countries. The same monthly logic applies to the micro contract, according to the exchange.

For the current month that means: October 2026 has its last Friday on October 30. Hold an October contract today and you hold it for another two weeks. The CME lists the next six consecutive monthly contracts plus the next two December contracts, so you have the choice between short and longer terms.

At Eurex, the Friday rule is documented for the options on the Bitcoin index futures: there, trading ends at 5pm Central European Time on the last Friday of the expiry month, with terms of three serial months plus two quarterly months and a maximum of nine months. For the Eurex futures themselves, the exchange's product page names no expiry calendar; you look that up in the contract specifications before placing an order.

The rollover matters in practice. To hold a position beyond expiry, you have to move it into the next contract month actively, selling the expiring one and buying the next. That does not happen automatically, and it costs both sides of the spread.

Basis, contango and backwardation: the gap between future and spot price

The future almost never trades exactly at the spot price. The difference between the two is called the basis. If the future sits above the spot price, the market is in contango; if it sits below, in backwardation. Both terms describe a price difference only, not a forecast.

The reason for a basis is sober enough to start with: money tied up until the expiry date has an interest value, and holding an inventory until then has costs. Market expectation comes on top. The basis therefore says something about sentiment, but it says it unreliably, and a high premium is no buy signal.

For you, the basis is above all a cost item. Roll into a more expensive contract every month and you pay that premium every time. Over a year it adds up to a figure that can eat an otherwise correct read on the market.

Access in Germany: MiFID II, broker approval and the line to the CFD

A futures contract on Bitcoin is legally not a crypto asset but a derivative, and therefore a financial instrument under the European markets directive MiFID II. That sounds like a technicality, but it decides which rulebook applies: the crypto regulation MiCA, which governs trading in coins and the licensing of platforms, has no competence over derivatives.

For the route to a contract, that means you need an account with a provider that offers futures trading and approves you for it. Approval is preceded by an assessment of your knowledge and experience with complex products; that is the provider's duty, not a courtesy. Which crypto brokers carry this access at all, and at what cost, differs considerably, and the order fee is only part of the bill.

One confusion is particularly worth avoiding. Exchange-traded futures are not contracts for difference. The European leverage caps that apply to CFDs on crypto assets do not bite on a future at a futures exchange; in return, a clearing house stands in between and a broker has to approve you first. How the supervisor fits perpetual futures into that grid is something we set out in detail on October 2, 2026, in our analysis of perpetual futures and the CFD rules.

Perpetual futures are a different thing: funding rate instead of expiry

Read about futures in the crypto world and you are usually reading about perpetual futures, or perps. These are contracts with no expiry date. Because the mechanism that ties a normal future to the spot price at the end of its term is missing, a substitute is needed: the funding rate. That is a payment flowing at short intervals between holders of long and short positions, pulling the perp price towards the spot price.

A completely different cost profile follows. On a monthly contract you pay the basis when you roll; on a perp you pay or receive funding continuously, often several times a day. A position left open for weeks can be eaten into considerably by that, even if the price barely moves. This is no argument against perps, but it is an argument for not lumping the two instruments together: one has an end date, the other a running bill.

Tax: forward transactions do not fall under the one-year rule

Tax treatment is where the difference between coin and contract turns most expensive. A gain on the sale of coins can be tax-free after a holding period of one year, because it counts as a private disposal. A forward transaction does not: it belongs to investment income, and there no holding period rescues anything.

As we set out on October 12, 2026, in our piece on the taxation of crypto futures, withholding tax applies to crypto futures and perps from the first trade onwards, and the one-year rule does not count there. Because a futures account is settled every day as well, a great many individual entries build up over a year. Without clean records that turns into a long night in the spring; tax tools and portfolio trackers take that part off your hands, provided they can read your provider's futures trading at all.

Bitcoin futures: the next CME expiry falls on October 30

Bitcoin futures are not a detour to the coin but an instrument of their own, with their own calendar, their own cost structure and their own tax rule. Three things decide whether they suit you, and all three can be settled before the first order.

1. Settle what you actually want: a holding or a price move. To own and hold coins, the route runs through one of the regulated crypto exchanges and not through the futures market.
2. Check whether your provider carries futures trading at all, which contract sizes it offers and how it handles the duty to top up. The comparison of crypto brokers shows where this access comes with which costs.
3. Set up the record-keeping before the first position runs, not after. A tax tool or portfolio tracker that processes the daily settlement of your futures account spares you a reconstruction by hand.

(As of October 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)