Options on BlackRock’s popular iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) began trading on the Nasdaq Tuesday, ushering in a new way to trade and speculate on the price of bitcoin.

IBIT traded 73,000 options contracts in the first 60 mins of trading Tuesday, Nasdaq told CNBC, placing the fund in the top 20 of the most active nonindex options.

Options trading allows investors to play bitcoin’s notorious volatility by letting them buy or sell an asset at a predetermined price based on whether they anticipate the price will rise or fall in a given period.

“Bitcoin has a lively derivatives market, but in the U.S. it is still tiny compared to other asset classes, and is largely limited to institutional players,” said Noelle Acheson, economist and author of the “Crypto is Macro Now” newsletter. “A deeper onshore derivatives market will enhance the growing market sophistication. This will reinforce investor confidence in the asset, bringing in new cohorts while enabling a greater variety of investment and trading strategies … [That] should, all else being equal, dampen both volatility and downside.”

The market for options contracts on major ETFs can be extremely active, and are widely used by more sophisticated traders. For example, over the past five business days, Interactive Brokers clients have more options orders on the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) and the SDPR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) than for the funds themselves, according to data from the brokerage.

The launch of the bitcoin ETF options will likely also lead to new funds that incorporate those options, said Todd Sohn, ETF strategist at Strategas.

“Grayscale already did a filing for a covered call [fund], and I’m sure BlackRock will come out with it too. And then we’re going to get buffers, and then we’re going to get whatever other trend-following-type strategy that folks think of. I think the ecosystem’s really going to start to fly here,” Sohn said.

The stock prices for H&R Block and Intuit fell after a report Tuesday said Trump’s government efficiency team is considering creating a free tax-filing app.

Intuit, which makes the TurboTax tax-filing software, was down 5%, putting it on pace for its worst day since Aug. 23, when the company’s stock price fell nearly 7%. H&R Block was down 8% and on pace for its worst day since 2020.

President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has held “highly preliminary” discussions about creating the free tax-filing app, The Washington Post reported. The so-called DOGE will not be an official government department but an outside advisory commission. It will be led by billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and aims to slash government spending.

A DOGE tax-filing app would be a competitor of both H&R Block and TurboTax.

Intuit spokeswoman Tania Mercado didn’t directly address the prospect of a government tax-filing app, but told CNBC in a statement that, “For decades, Intuit has publicly called for simplifying the U.S. tax code so individuals, families, and small businesses can better understand their finances.”

George Agurkis, H&R Block’s director of government relations, said in an email that the company looks forward “to engaging with the new Administration and the Department of Government Efficiency on their ideas related to sound and efficient tax administration.”

It’s unclear where a new DOGE tax app would bridge with newer policies the Biden administration already implemented. Under the Biden administration, the IRS in March rolled out a pilot Direct File program in 12 states, allowing qualified taxpayers to file directly through a government portal. The IRS also offers free filing services through its Free File program for taxpayers who make an adjusted gross income of $79,000 or less. 

While both Intuit and H&R Block have free filing options, neither have had stellar records when it comes to transparently offering those services. 

The Federal Trade Commission in February filed an administrative complaint against H&R Block for deceptively marketing free filing products and wrongfully deleting users’ in-progress tax data. Intuit, meanwhile, agreed to pay $141 million in restitution “for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free,” according to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James.

WATCH: Spruce Point shorts Intuit

Bitcoin moved higher Tuesday even amid rising geopolitical tensions between Ukraine and Russia.

The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 2% at $93,803.51, according to Coin Metrics, topping its previous intraday record of $93,469.08, reached last week. Shares of MicroStrategy, which trade as a bitcoin proxy, rose nearly 10%.

The move follows overnight to reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the U.S. that the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons had come down in response to President Joe Biden allowing Ukraine to use U.S. missiles to strike military targets inside Russia. Initially, bitcoin moved higher while stocks sold off. In afternoon trading, however, bitcoin advanced further as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite erased losses.

Bitcoin has recently benefited from enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies after the U.S. presidential election. That drove bitcoin to fresh records and sent smaller crypto assets soaring. Like gold, crypto assets are seen by many investors as a “non-confiscatable,” long-term hedge against geopolitical uncertainty.

“The most significant long-term correlations for bitcoin are a negative correlation with the U.S. dollar and a positive correlation with money supply growth,” Matt Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck, said Oct. 28 on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“Bitcoin is a chameleon,” Sigel added. “Its correlations change over time; it’s hard to predict what it’s going to be correlated with over the short term.”

Bitcoin has behaved as a safe haven before. It outperformed during the crisis in the regional banking system in early 2023, for example. But because bitcoin is also a risky asset without a long history, with extreme volatility that can benefit short-term traders, some have a hard time arguing that bitcoin is necessarily attractive forever. Citigroup, for example, in a note Monday reiterated the bank’s view that bitcoin doesn’t exhibit store-of-value properties.