By Jinman Li
Medill Reports
Chicago is becoming a honeypot for cryptocurrency and will attract more and more crypto companies in the future, panelists said Tuesday at a luncheon panel hosted by the Executives’ Club of Chicago.
The birth of stock futures trading in the last century in Chicago demonstrated the city’s innovative spirit, said Sunil Cutinho, the president of CME Clearing. Compared with other metropolitans such as New York and San Francisco, Chicago focuses more on markets and has a unique ecosystem as a financial center, he added.
The different players in the ecosystem such as exchanges, financial institutions and technology companies are entering the cryptocurrency space, forming a concentration of upgrading power in Chicago, said Peter Johnson, vice president at Jump Capital, a Chicago-based venture capital firm.
Johnson said that Kraken, a bitcoin exchange based in San Francisco, is going to open its largest office in Chicago in 12 to 18 months.