Nine crypto coins are now traded inside a single, financially settled futures contract on CME Group’s platform, but Bitcoin and Ethereum together make up 86.29% of that basket. The Nasdaq CME Crypto Index (NCI) and its micro-sized companion give institutions a way to hedge or gain exposure to a nine-asset crypto basket through one trade instead of managing separate spot positions.
CME’s published contract specifications describe NCI futures and Micro NCI futures (MCI) as financially settled against the Nasdaq CME Crypto Settlement Price Index, meaning no delivery of underlying tokens and no custody chain to manage at expiry. That structure is the point: a desk that wants crypto-market exposure, or a hedge against a multi-token portfolio, no longer needs nine separate futures legs or nine separate spot wallets to get there.
CME positions the contracts as tools for portfolio hedging, macro overlays, and directional exposure across the crypto market. Because the index settles financially rather than physically, a fund running long spot Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a handful of altcoins can offset that book with a single short position in NCI futures rather than stacking hedges across separate crypto futures markets for each asset.
That’s the operational pitch: fewer legs, one margin account, one settlement price. It also puts the product in the same regulated lane as CME’s existing single-asset Bitcoin and Ether futures, giving institutions a familiar clearing and margining framework instead of a bespoke basket built from nine separate spot custody relationships.
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The Basket Is Still a Bitcoin Trade
The Nasdaq CME Crypto Index itself is built to be dynamic, broadly representative of the market, and readily trackable by investors, per Nasdaq’s own index methodology. Constituent selection runs through a list of Core Exchanges, including Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and LMAX Digital, and Core Custodians such as Coinbase, Fidelity, and BitGo.
The index is free-float market-cap weighted and rebalanced and reconstituted quarterly, which is why its composition and weights shift over time rather than staying fixed at launch. As of the September 1 snapshot, the basket held nine assets in the following order:
That distribution tells the real story. Nine-asset breadth on paper translates into an 86.29% combined weighting toward Bitcoin and Ethereum, with the remaining seven tokens, including Hyperliquid. HYPE itself has drawn attention amid broader derivatives activity, accounting for the last 13.71%.
So, a trader buying NCI futures for diversification is, in practice, buying a leveraged Bitcoin position with a thin Ethereum and altcoin garnish.
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What the CME Crypto Structure Solves?
The single-trade design genuinely removes friction. Managing nine separate spot positions across nine wallets and multiple custodians is operationally expensive and introduces counterparty risk at every leg.
Collapsing into one CME-cleared futures contract standardizes margin, settlement, and reporting under a framework that already handles single-asset Bitcoin and Ether futures.
What it doesn’t solve is correlation. Bitcoin and Ether tend to move together during broad risk-on and risk-off swings, and with the two combining for well over four-fifths of NCI’s weight, the index’s volatility profile will track Bitcoin far more closely than any equal-weighted crypto basket would.
For traders seeking a hedge against a genuinely diversified altcoin book, rather than a compact wrapper for BTC and ETH exposure, the nine-asset label overstates how much the contract actually diversifies away idiosyncratic token risk.
Nasdaq’s methodology also means the composition described here is a snapshot, not a fixed allocation. Quarterly rebalancing and reconstitution can add or drop constituents and shift weights as market capitalization and liquidity change, so a desk building a hedge around today’s 74.47% Bitcoin weighting should expect that number to move by the next quarterly reset.
For now, the index remains a Bitcoin and Ethereum product with a long tail attached, and CME’s futures wrapper makes that concentrated exposure easier to trade, not necessarily easier to diversify.
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