CME Group is building a bridge between two of the largest pools of money on the planet: the cash US Treasury market and Treasury futures. The new platform, called Treasury LINK, is designed to make spread and basis trading between the two markets meaningfully easier, faster, and cheaper for institutional players.
What Treasury LINK actually does
The platform is built on the BrokerTec Chicago central limit order book, or CLOB, which launched on October 6, 2025. That order book is integrated with CME Globex, the exchange’s electronic trading engine that already handles an enormous share of global derivatives volume.
The integration matters because it allows traders to execute cash-futures spreads and basis trades within a single, connected infrastructure. Previously, participants had to navigate separate venues for each leg of the trade, introducing execution risk and operational friction.
Treasury LINK supports all seven on-the-run benchmark US Treasuries, covering the full curve. The platform also offers smaller notional sizes and tighter price increments than what’s currently standard, which should lower the barrier to entry for a broader set of institutional participants.
