Exactly. Pit mine sees who's buying what and is worried copper will go down. Datacenter people see who's inking deals and are worried it's gonna go up. They both need to get big fancy loans from their bankers to execute their upcoming projects. The bankers won't like to see unbounded risk on their balance sheets. A futures contract exists to solve this problem.

Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...