The CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR) has achieved nine years of uninterrupted service, cementing its role as the most liquid, and most trusted, institutional price of Bitcoin.

Foundational

Around this time of the year, we at CF Benchmarks typically take a moment to reflect on the launch of a certain index. It’s one that turned out to be foundational, not just for us, but also – without much hyperbole – the global project of institutional crypto adoption as a whole.

That is because November was the month, nine years ago, when the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR) published the benchmark price of Bitcoin for the first time.

Fast forward to now, and November 2025 marks nine years of uninterrupted, 100% uptime for BRR, since its launch.

As institutional adoption gathers pace – not least due to the continually increasing volume of assets referencing BRR – the index is increasingly affirmed as pivotal for the evolution of crypto market infrastructure, and a pillar of the foundation upon which institutional Bitcoin exposure has been built.

And with more and more clients integrating BRR into products offering that exposure, more and more investors are coming to understand the importance of BRR, for the first time.

So, this ninth BRR anniversary is not only an opportunity to give ourselves, our partners and our clients, a small pat on the back; but also, to refresh the record about those critical qualities that continue to make BRR the key bridge to institutional adoption of digital assets.

BRR Basics

For those less familiar with the acronym ‘BRR’, it defines a once-a-day reference rate aggregating Bitcoin-U.S. dollar trade data from multiple Bitcoin exchanges. Note, these venues are exclusively those that have been determined to meet and maintain stringent, rules-based eligibility criteria.

Launched on 14th November 2016, BRR was the first regulated, institutionally aligned benchmark for Bitcoin pricing. BRR has been calculated without interruption every day since that inception date and is now the most trusted and widely used benchmark for Bitcoin risk settlement.

BRR’s Three ‘Rs’

As a Registered Benchmark under the UK Benchmarks Regulation (BMR) framework, and regulated by the UK FCA, BRR is engineered for precision, replicability, and resistance to manipulation.

These features are encapsulated in what we at CF Benchmarks refer to as the ‘Three Rs’, denoting the three qualities we believe are essential for any index to exhibit, in order to be an authentic Benchmark: accurate market Representation, Resistance to manipulation, and friction-free Replicability.

These qualities are outlined in the graphic below.

The Importance of Integrity

Among those qualities, resistance to manipulation, which underpins the price integrity of any benchmark is perhaps the most critical, particularly for regulated institutions seeking to create regulated crypto products referencing BRR.

BRR’s methodology — including a one-hour observation window, partitioned time slices, volume-weighted medians, and outlier filtering — is integral to the design that ensures that price integrity.

In turn, it is the assurance of integrity that qualifies BRR to serve as the settlement index for CME Group’s Bitcoin, Micro Bitcoin Futures, CME Bitcoin options, and other BTC products offered by the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, and why BRR is also deployed for settlement of contracts listed on the Crypto Facilities MTF (a firm in the same group of companies as Kraken).

Additionally, BRR is the NAV/iNAV source for a growing suite of institutional investment products, while also being utilized as the reference price for dozens of other regulated products and instruments globally.

BRRNY and BRRAP

Meanwhile, BRR has steadily expanded into a global Bitcoin benchmark system, with time-zoned variants tailored to regional market hours in key jurisdictions:

BRRNY - New York Variant is designed to play a central role in U.S. market infrastructure, given its publication at 4:00 pm New York Time. It is the benchmark price for the world’s largest Bitcoin ETF, the iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), as well as for several other U.S.-listed Bitcoin funds, including those issued by Bitwise, ARK/21Shares, Franklin Templeton and WisdomTree.
Elsewhere, BRRAP - Asia Pacific Variant extends benchmark alignment for the key trading hours in Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, with its publication at 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time and Singapore Time. It’s fitting that BRAAP serves as the benchmark price for all spot Bitcoin products listed in Hong Kong, including funds issued by ChinaAMC, Harvest Global Investments, and most recently, MicroBit Capital Management.

All BRR variants retain the original BRR methodology and reinforce its status as a foundational benchmark standard in the institutionalization of Bitcoin across geographies and regulatory frameworks.

Unmatched Liquidity

Unsurprisingly then, the breadth of BRR’s adoption is reflected by its scale.

Considering just CME Bitcoin futures alone, it is notable that since the inception of these contracts in December 2017, an estimated $4.0 trillion in cumulative notional volume has been settled to BRR-based CME contracts.

If that’s not an objective signal of market trust, then what is?

In turn, it is BRR’s ubiquity as a reference rate that cements its role as an anchor in a broad and growing liquidity complex — including futures, options, ETFs, ETPs, and structured products — all interconnected through BRR-linked pricing, as illustrated below.