For risk and compliance reasons, many investors/entities cannot or will not participate in BTC spot markets. Futures markets -- and potentially ETFs -- are an avenue for those people to get exposure to the market.
Indeed. People still don't seem to understand that unfortunately. It has been like that with Soros and Rothschild as well. People blatantly assume that they will buy crypto directly, while it's actually only the exposure they are after.
They don't care about crypto itself, and for that reason likely won't bother going for it, and then we have the legal side forming an obstacle. It perfectly shows why the volumes of the future markets have been growing lately.
I like how this offers loud traditional skeptics the option to put their money where their mouth is. If they really believe in a crash or doom scenario, then that's their way to back up their words, otherwise they are full of shit.