Yes, I understand that and I wasn't dismissing CME as a simple platform. I used to work across the street from the CME and saw the traders walking around in their yellow jackets every day. The "corn" was only one example to tie it to a bank services scenario.
>, and a minter of new derivative products like S&P futures
I think Coinbase recently offered something similar: https://www.google.com/search?q=Coinbase+launches+Derivative...
Somehow, the wordsmithing in my comment got misconstrued as being dismissive of CME as being too simple and praising Coinbase as being complex.
I was trying to convey that a farmer can't get a loan from the CME to finance his seeds/fertilizer/etc and use his corn crops as collateral. What is factually incorrect about that?
Coinbase and CME have obvious overlaps, but they also have massive financial functions where they don't. That's what the corn bank loan example was trying to highlight.
EDIT to reply: >The assertion is that Coinbase has more work to do and thus more need for headcount than CME. I dispute that.
Sorry for the misunderstanding! I never intended to convince people that Coinbase needs more employees than CME. I should have put a disclaimer in my original comment such as "Coinbase may only need 1/10th the number of CME employees but as fyi, Coinbase is not a direct comparable to CME..."
It's an interesting idea, but don't think you can segregate their exchange role from their authorship or standardization of financial instruments. Any exchange is either creating products to trade or licensing them. Any commodity exchange is naturally interested in setting contract standards related to delivery and quality.
They are an exchange, through and through. Everything else is a side project in support of that one role.