Ten years ago this week, CME Group launched the Ultra 10-Year U.S. Treasury Note futures (TN). Today, with volumes routinely topping 700,000 contracts per day and open interest hovering around 2.5 million ($250 billion), it is easy to take this liquidity for granted. But as we celebrate this milestone, it is worth documenting why it worked when attempts in prior decades to "futurize" this specific point on the curve had struggled. The success of the Ultra 10 wasn't accidental – it was a victory of remarkably innovative product design meeting a shifting macro landscape.

To understand the Ultra 10’s success, you first have to appreciate the mechanics of the classic 10-Year (TY). The TY is a giant and invaluable industry benchmark, deriving tremendous strength from a delivery basket that aggregates liquidity from notes and bonds in the 6.5- to 8-year maturity range (prior to the Sep 2023 contract, the top end of the maturity range was 10 years). 

However, given the Treasury futures contract's 6% notional reference coupon and an environment where market yields remain well below 6%, the classic TY effectively tracks the shorter end of its basket (6.5 to 7 years) on the Treasury yield curve.

This dynamic created a gap. The market needed a true 10-year instrument to hedge the "center of gravity" for the global fixed-income market – the specific point heavily used for duration by asset managers and for hedging U.S. mortgage and corporate bond portfolios.

This fundamental market need collided with a unique regulatory catalyst: Basel III. We launched the Ultra 10 on Jan. 10, 2016, just as the Supplementary Leverage Ratio (SLR) requirements were beginning to bite. Because SLR counted Treasury positions in the total exposure denominator, banks faced new balance sheet pressures for holding cash Treasuries. This created a singular timing opportunity to launch a capital-efficient, off-balance-sheet alternative, but only if we could deliver a credible design that tracked the cash market with precision.

The innovation lay in solving the "deliverable puzzle." We designed a basket restricted to original-issue 10-year notes with at least 9 years and 5 months remaining. This resulted in a basket of just three securities: the Old-Old, the Old and the Current.

Historically, reliance on a narrower basket might have raised concerns regarding deliverable supply. While these were well-addressed by 2016 through a combination of well-managed position limits, advanced regulatory oversight technology and extensive market education, we delivered a robust design to further eliminate any concerns. Our confidence was underpinned by an insightful observation regarding the macroeconomy: We recognized that growing fiscal deficits were steadily increasing issuance sizes. We correctly anticipated that this trend would provide a deep enough pool of deliverable supply to support a narrow-basket contract. Our view proved correct, as U.S. marketable debt has continued to grow, ensuring the contract remains robust.

The execution of this strategy resulted in the most successful Interest Rate product launch in the industry’s history. Within just four days of launch, volumes surpassed 60,000 contracts. Critically, this growth did not come at the expense of the existing market. Contrary to fears of fragmentation, we saw no cannibalization of the classic TY. Instead, the Ultra 10 enabled traders to express precise views on the yield curve slope – specifically, the spread between the 7-year and 10-year points – which unlocked relative value strategies that boosted volumes in both contracts. The open interest and volumes in TY today are almost twice versus 10 years ago.

The relentless expansion in the Ultra 10 translates to a 30% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in ADV and a 35% CAGR in average daily open interest from 2016 to 2025. While participation in the 2.5 million contracts ($250 billion notional size) is extensive across the industry, the CFTC reported 230 Large Open Interest Holders (LOIH) in its weekly Commitments of Traders report published on December 31, 2025. 

In 2025, an average daily volume of almost $72 billion in notional equivalents of Ultra 10 Treasury futures traded, supported by standing passive liquidity at Top of Book (TOB) in CME Group’s centralized electronic market on Globex. This liquidity holds tight at bid-offer spreads of just one Minimum Price Increment (MPI) wide – or 1/2 of 1/32 – the standard price quoting convention used in the Treasury market.

As we look toward the next decade, the 10-year Treasury will remain the most important point on the yield curve. While the administration is targeting a yield of 4% or lower, industry stakeholders are not convinced yet this can be achieved near-term.

To navigate the dynamic of monetary policy guiding rates down, while a fiscal deficit adds $2 trillion of debt every year, market participants can leverage the Ultra 10 as a mature, highly capital-efficient risk management instrument.