Investing.com - The price of the digital currency bitcoin pushed higher on Tuesday, while bitcoin futures fell in their second day of trading amid low volumes on the Cboe Futures Exchange.
On the U.S.-based GDAX exchange, Bitcoin was at $17,113.80 by 09:54 AM ET (14:54 GMT).
Prices hit a record high of $19,380 on the exchange on Thursday, extending their gains for the year after starting 2017 at around $1,000.
Cboe bitcoin futures, listed under the ticker XBT, traded down more than 2% at $18,110 after earlier falling more than 3.5%
The contract had soared almost 20% in its Monday debut, with a total of 4,127 contracts traded and about 20 firms participating, according to Cboe.
Larger exchange CME Group (NASDAQ:CME) will begin initial listings of bitcoin futures contracts on December 18.
Bitcoin enthusiasts hope the launch of bitcoin derivatives will allow institutional investors to buy into the digital currency trend, helping establish bitcoin as a legitimate asset class and pave the way for an exchange-traded fund.
Meanwhile, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex reported an outage on Tuesday, saying that its platform was under distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS, which managed to take it down.
"We are currently under heavy DDOS. API is also down. We are working on further mitigation.” the exchange tweeted.
Coinbase, the US-based cryptocurrency trading platform, was also down.
Elsewhere in cryptocurrency trading, Bitcoin Cash was last at $1,529.60, while Bitcoin Gold was at $260.50.
Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap after bitcoin, was at $558.92.