It was only Interactive Brokers when I looked a couple of days ago. Those are all small retail brokerages, what I'm getting at is that most professional futures traders using the big FCMs wouldn't be able to trade it still stands valid. Also, they'll all be waiting for the CME tomorrow evening anyway not least because the contract is 5x the size so it means that costs will be much lower.
TD Ameritrade (one of the biggest US brokers) is going to start trading the futures on Monday, too.
Again a retail brokerage.
I agree that futures are intended for a different purpose. However, the still allow investors to speculate on
the price of the underlying asset. I would argue that it may actually be a better way for institutional investors,
because they don´t have to worry about cold storage, malware, inside jobs of "rogue employees" and so on.
Not how I imagine it will play out. Futures don't get used like that as you would be paying interest and to fees constantly rollover contracts.
The advantage of having futures available to institutional investors is that it allows them to hedge. So if they were holding 100 BTC and they thought the price was going down over the next few days they would just short equivalent size in the futures (20 CME contracts). This saves them all the hassles involved in actually selling Bitcoins and it is just as easy to cover the position when they think the sell off is over. This means they wouldn't have to actually hold coins on an exchange they can look after them safely and the costs involved in doing it this way are trivial compared to actually moving coins and money in and out of crypto exchanges.
That's the whole thing here about the futures, they just open up possibilities that make Bitcoin more attractive to a lot more people. Don't expect the CME contract to trade huge volume the first days or weeks, this will build up slowly.