Bitcoin futures is the fastest growing segment of bitcoin trading at the moment. Mostly it's traders wanting the high (10x-50x) leverage that's available with t

Bitcoin futures is the fastest growing segment of bitcoin trading at the moment. Mostly it's traders wanting the high (10x-50x) leverage that's available with the futures products that are out there now. And it's mostly on the Chinese exchanges, though it might well be westerners making most of the volume. It's still a very immature segment of a relatively immature market, but the price for contracts generally stays within a dollar or two of the spot price (well, an index of several spot prices). There are several problems using it as a valid hedge at the moment, but the main one is liquidity. Anything over a couple hundred BTC (leveraged value) becomes a challenge to move in and out of the market. And that's for futures that are weekly in nature. The longer term products are even less liquid. Still, it's a relatively young market, and it's already growing quickly. It'll probably get there. As far as using cryptocurrency for international trade, there was (is?) a coin trying the interesting experiment of a hard peg in value. Urocoin was created by an international trade company to be pegged at 1 URO = 1 metric tonne of urea. In other words, they were guaranteeing that whatever the market price, they'd deliver 1 tonne for one coin. They claimed a few deliveries and held a conference in Hong Kong explaining their plans for the future, but they seem to have faded out. There were a lot of claims they were a scam, but that seemed unlikely. A lot of work for a scam when you can do much much less and scam successfully with an altcoin. More than likely they just failed. But the idea of pegging a coin to a commodity to reduce the overhead of international trade was an interesting one, and one that will likely see more experiments down the road.