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Bitcoin fans are cheering the imminent launch of futures on the digital currency. But critics say the new market could be roiled by hacks, technical snafus or manipulation schemes.

Trading of the first U.S. bitcoin futures is set to begin at 6 p.m. ET Sunday on an exchange run by Cboe Global Markets Inc., while its larger rival CME Group Inc. plans to introduce its own bitcoin futures a week later.

One risk, critics say, is that the underlying markets for bitcoin are largely unregulated and have a troubled history. Mt. Gox, once the largest bitcoin exchange, collapsed in 2014 after being robbed of more than $470 million worth of bitcoin. Other bitcoin exchanges have faced criminal charges of money laundering.

“The Bitcoin cash markets (Lol wut???)are immature, and hardly seem the epitome of robustness,” Craig Pirrong, a finance professor at the University of Houston, wrote in a blog post last week. “Behemoth futures contracts could be standing on spindly cash market legs.”

The shaky foundations of the bitcoin market add uncertainty to a market already known for wild gyrations. Bitcoin exchanges have been plagued with glitches and choppy trading in recent weeks, even as the price of the virtual currency hit record highs—passing $17,000 on Thursday, up from just $968.23 at the start of the year, according to CoinDesk.

For their futures products, CME and Cboe are betting that a handful of bitcoin exchanges are sufficiently reliable and trustworthy to support a derivatives market.

CME is using four of them—Bitstamp, GDAX, itBit and Kraken—to produce a daily bitcoin price index, which its futures would track. Cboe is using one, Gemini, founded by the brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

All five of those exchanges have taken steps to embrace regulation and anti-money-laundering laws. Representatives of the bitcoin exchanges said the industry had matured and bolstered its security.

“Exchanges that weren’t up to a certain standard, due to incompetence, have died out,” said Bitstamp Chief Executive Nejc Kodrič.

Still, recent mishaps have raised questions about whether bitcoin exchanges are ready for prime time. On Nov. 29, heavy trading sparked by bitcoin breaking through $10,000 the previous evening caused outages at Bitstamp and GDAX, among other exchanges.

CME’s index suffered a “calculation error” that day and had to be corrected, according to a CME spokeswoman. CME was still able to collect data from its partner bitcoin exchanges, she said, but declined to elaborate on the causes of the error.

Some critics warn that unscrupulous traders could push around the price of bitcoin on the bitcoin exchanges, manipulating prices in the underlying market in order to reap profits from the futures.

“Bang-the-settlement type manipulations are a major concern,” Mr. Pirrong wrote. “Relatively small volumes of purchases or sales could move the price around substantially.”

Compounding fears, the bitcoin exchanges partnering with CME and Cboe account for a narrow slice of the market. That means a manipulator wouldn’t need to move the price of bitcoin world-wide, but just on a small number of exchanges.

CME’s four partner exchanges together handle roughly 10% of daily global bitcoin volume, according to coinhills.com, although they account for around one-third of bitcoin trading in dollars, which CME argues is the more important measure.

“For all new products that don’t have a huge liquid market to begin with, those would be easier to manipulate,” said Aitan Goelman, a former enforcement chief at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

CME says it has taken steps to combat manipulation. For instance, its index is based on trades in bitcoin calculated over a one-hour period, with anomalous trades tossed out. “Ultimately, influencing the [index] would require significant trading activity on several exchanges over an extended period of time,” the firm said in a Dec. 1 filing.

CME also is working to add more bitcoin exchanges to its index, the CME spokeswoman said.

Cboe’s contract uses a price determined in a daily auction at Gemini. Gemini data show its daily auction volumes this year have averaged $1.3 million—a drop in the bucket of global bitcoin trading, which runs into the billions of dollars daily. Gemini’s auction process also has failed to produce a price several times in recent months, on lightly traded weekends or holidays.

Gemini says its auction will gain in volume as Cboe’s bitcoin futures contract takes off, and even if the auction is small relative to global trading activity, it offers a useful measure of bitcoin’s price at one point in time each day.

“Auction mechanisms are tried and true,” said Gemini President Cameron Winklevoss.

Cboe is “very comfortable” with the Gemini auction, its president and chief operating officer Chris Concannon said in an interview. Cboe’s agreement with Gemini allows Cboe to identify any “bad actors” attempting to manipulate the auction, he added.

The CFTC, which regulates futures exchanges, pushed CME and Cboe to take additional steps to prevent manipulation, such as surveillance measures, it said in a Dec. 1 statement. Cboe agreed in talks with the regulator to add a protective “collar” to its futures contract, people familiar with the situation said.

With the collar, Cboe can override the result of the Gemini auction if it swings more than 5% higher or lower than the average market price of bitcoin across several exchanges, according to a Dec. 1 filing. That gives Cboe a tool to handle potential distortions.

Still, even some cryptocurrency veterans aren’t convinced that the market is ready for the kind of bitcoin futures that CME and Cboe plan to launch.

“It’s premature,” said Paul Chou, chief executive of LedgerX, a startup trading platform for bitcoin options that competes with CME and Cboe. If the exchange giants’ efforts stumble, it could create a “a new headline risk that could set us back months or years,” he said.