Currency futures were first created at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) in 1972, less than one year after the system of fixed exchange rates was abandoned along with the gold standard. Some commodity traders at the CME did not have access to the inter-bank exchange markets in the early 1970s, when they believed that significant changes were about to take place in the currency market. They established the International Monetary Market (IMM) and launched trading in seven currency futures on May 16, 1972. Today, the IMM is a division of CME. In the fourth quarter of 2009, CME Group FX volume averaged 754,000 contracts per day, reflecting average daily notional value of approximately $100 billion. Currently most of these are traded electronically.

Other futures exchanges that trade currency futures are Euronext.liffe, Tokyo Financial Exchange and IntercontinentalExchange.

A currency future, also FX future or foreign exchange future, is a futures contract to exchange one currency for another at a specified date in the future at a price (exchange rate) that is fixed on the purchase date; see Foreign exchange derivative. Typically, one of the currencies is the US dollar. The price of a future is then in terms of US dollars per unit of other currency. This can be different from the standard way of quoting in the spot foreign exchange markets. The trade unit of each contract is then a certain amount of other currency, for instance €125,000. Most contracts have physical delivery, so for those held at the end of the last trading day, actual payments are made in each currency. However, most contracts are closed out before that. Investors can close out the contract at any time prior to the contract’s delivery date.