Creating a new cotton futures contract took Intercontinental Exchange years of planning, multiple rounds of wrangling with cotton merchants and finally an act of US Congress — but the exchange operator has quietly pulled the plug just 18 months after its debut.

The global product was designed as an alternative to the US cotton futures contract that has been the industry benchmark for decades, but whose limitations have contributed to wild price swings.

The new product, however, failed to take off, underlining the challenge of creating new derivatives products from scratch. Despite early expressions of interest, the global contract never attracted much volume after its launch in November 2015. The last trade took place a year ago.

The failure of the world cotton futures contract speaks to the difficulty of generating interest in a new derivatives market when liquidity is concentrated in another one.

Merchants had advocated for a world futures contract to overcome the constraints of the longstanding benchmark, which allows only US-grown bales to satisfy delivery obligations. When domestic supplies are tight, market squeezes and wild price moves sometimes result.

Despite its drawbacks, the ICE’s US cotton futures contract has registered record open interest of more than 2,00,000 contracts this year.