Digital assets
Digital assets through official data only
This page covers digital assets exclusively through sources whose licenses permit republication: the CFTC's Commitments of Traders positioning for CME bitcoin and ether futures (US government work, public domain), the BIS CBDC project index (published "as a public good"), and bitcoin and ether reference prices quoted as cited facts from FRED, whose Coinbase license forbids reproducing the series itself. That constraint is the design. Most of what circulates as crypto market data comes from commercial aggregators whose terms do not permit a site like this one to republish it, and this page says plainly, source by source, what is excluded and why. The result is narrower than a crypto dashboard and every number on it can be traced and defended.
Data as of Jul 14, 2026 COT report week (CFTC); FRED readings Jul 17, 2026; BIS CBDC vintage Mar 1, 2024
Bitcoin and ether reference prices: cited, not charted
FRED serves Coinbase spot reference prices (daily, as of 5 PM Pacific). Their series notes state, verbatim: "Reproduction of Coinbase data in any form is prohibited except with the prior written permission of Coinbase." Charting the history here would reproduce the data, so this page does what the license permits: it quotes the latest reading as a cited fact and links to the source, the same treatment this site applies to the ICE BofA option-adjusted spreads on corporate credit.
Source: FRED, Coinbase Bitcoin (CBBTCUSD) | FRED, Coinbase Ethereum (CBETHUSD) Latest readings quoted as cited facts under the series' own copyright notice; the histories are not reproduced here.
Who holds CME crypto futures: the one public-domain window
The CFTC's Traders in Financial Futures report is the one long-running, public-domain view of positioning in US-regulated crypto derivatives. CME bitcoin futures listed in December 2017 and enter the report on Apr 10, 2018, the first week 20 or more traders held reportable positions; ether follows from Apr 6, 2021. Since the SEC approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded products on January 10, 2024, the leveraged-funds short leg of the cash-and-carry basis trade (short futures against ETF or spot holdings) has dominated this market's structure: leveraged funds' deepest pre-2024 net short in the bitcoin contract was -9,831 contracts, and their record, set Dec 17, 2024, is -23,197 contracts (-54.6% of open interest). At the Jul 14, 2026 report they are net -7,491 in bitcoin (-38.6% of OI) and net -7,961 in ether (-35.3%), while dealers are net long 4,616 bitcoin contracts. The micro bitcoin contract tells the opposite story: leveraged funds there are net LONG 4,970 contracts (+17.2% of that contract's OI), a reminder that position direction differs by contract size and clientele.
Same construction and caveats as the derivatives positioning module: Tuesday snapshots published Friday, futures only, net = long minus short as a share of open interest, positions are stocks not flows, and extremes describe crowding, not direction. Excluded from this set: the delisted 2018-2019 Cboe bitcoin contract and the nano and perpetual-style contracts that entered the report in 2024-2026 with thin histories.
Bitcoin CME 133741 | TFF | from Apr 10, 2018
Ether (cash settled) CME 146021 | TFF | from Apr 6, 2021
| Contract | Trader class | Net contracts | Net, % of OI | 5y pctile | Full-history pctile | Weeks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | Dealer / intermediary | 4,616 | +23.8% | 85 | 91 | 432 |
| Asset manager / institutional | 2,815 | +14.5% | 8 | 44 | 432 | |
| Leveraged funds | -7,491 | -38.6% | 72 | 50 | 432 | |
| Other reportables | 246 | +1.3% | 41 | 47 | 432 | |
| Micro Bitcoin | Dealer / intermediary | -6,981 | -24.1% | 12 | 12 | 272 |
| Asset manager / institutional | -704 | -2.4% | 26 | 25 | 272 | |
| Leveraged funds | 4,970 | +17.2% | 97 | 97 | 272 | |
| Other reportables | 384 | +1.3% | 10 | 11 | 272 | |
| Ether (cash settled) | Dealer / intermediary | 9,175 | +40.7% | 98 | 98 | 276 |
| Asset manager / institutional | -1,406 | -6.2% | 16 | 15 | 276 | |
| Leveraged funds | -7,961 | -35.3% | 39 | 41 | 276 | |
| Other reportables | -64 | -0.3% | 45 | 43 | 276 | |
| Micro Ether | Dealer / intermediary | -1,658 | -3.5% | 43 | 43 | 240 |
| Asset manager / institutional | -7,640 | -15.9% | 4 | 4 | 240 | |
| Leveraged funds | -10,976 | -22.9% | 50 | 50 | 240 | |
| Other reportables | 18,921 | +39.4% | 87 | 87 | 240 |
Source: CFTC, Commitments of Traders historical files | SEC, statement on spot bitcoin ETP approval (Jan 10, 2024) US federal government work, public domain. Jul 14, 2026 report; latest week verified cell-for-cell against the CFTC's published report.
Central bank digital currencies: the BIS project index
The sovereign side of digital money, from the CBDC project database of Auer, Cornelli and Frost, published by the BIS and updated through the Mar 1, 2024 vintage (the latest the BIS has released; the dataset's own readme offers it "as a public good"). The paper's index "is equal to 0 when there is no announced project, 1 in the case of public research studies, 2 in the case of an ongoing or completed pilot and (a so-far hypothetical) 3 for a live CBDC", with one sub-index each for retail and wholesale projects and the overall index equal to the maximum of the two. By this vintage the "so-far hypothetical" top score is real for 4 retail systems: Bahamas (the), Eastern Caribbean, Jamaica, Nigeria. No wholesale CBDC was live. Of 194 jurisdictions in the database, 175 are rated.
| Index | 0: No announced project | 1: Research | 2: Pilot | 3: Live | Rated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall (max of the two) | 84 | 49 | 38 | 4 | 175 |
| Retail CBDC | 87 | 60 | 24 | 4 | 175 |
| Wholesale CBDC | 137 | 15 | 23 | 0 | 175 |
Source: BIS Working Paper No 880 (data page) Cite: Auer, R, G Cornelli and J Frost (2023), "Rise of the Central Bank Digital Currencies", International Journal of Central Banking, vol 19, no 4, pp 185-214. Jurisdiction count reflects two documented duplicate rows removed from the published sheet.
What is deliberately absent, and why
Price history. FRED's Coinbase series carry "Reproduction of Coinbase data in any form is prohibited except with the prior written permission of Coinbase." Latest readings are quoted above as cited facts; the series stay at FRED.
Stablecoin aggregates. No official body publishes a machine-readable stablecoin series. The BIS Data Portal serves no crypto or stablecoin dataset (all 29 of its dataflows were enumerated in building this page); BIS papers on stablecoins publish no data files; and the Federal Reserve's own stablecoin notes source their market figures from commercial aggregators whose terms do not permit republication here. When an official series exists, it belongs on this page.
Bitcoin ETF flows. Daily creation and redemption flows exist only on issuer sites and commercial trackers, none of them license-clean for republication. The CFTC positioning above is the license-clean shadow of that market structure: the post-January-2024 leveraged-funds short leg is the futures side of the ETF-era basis trade.
IMF and FSB monitoring. Their crypto and stablecoin monitoring appears as tables inside report PDFs, not as data releases; nothing machine-readable to build on.
Enforcement and sanctions. OFAC designations, which include crypto-related listings, are covered on financial crime.
Related: trader-class positioning across the financial core on positioning; payment systems and instruments on payments.