bitcoin Once hailed as an anti-establishment asset and antithesis to Wall Street, it can now yield to the shrewd traders on those same floors.
Trading in the leading cryptocurrency is steadily shifting toward CME Group, and the exchange’s shift to 24/7 derivatives later this year could cement its role as the dominant venue for institutional crypto risk.
The change eliminates one of the last advantages that crypto exchanges have: uninterrupted market access.
“You will see more traditional hedge fund managers become more involved in the asset class, because they will be able to trade them with instruments they know, without having to upgrade their technology or move their signals,” Karl Naim, chief trading officer at XBTO, told CoinDesk. “Why would they want to take on counterparty risk for an entity they don’t know?”
CME already leads the regulated bitcoin futures markets by open interest, and its contracts underpin much of the hedging activity linked to U.S. spot ETFs. So far, however, trading has halted over the weekend, producing the so-called “CME gaps” and leaving institutional investors unable to adjust their positions while offshore exchanges continued to operate.
Round-the-clock trading eliminates that limitation. Institutions that once relied solely on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or avoided exposure over the weekend will be able to continually hedge, narrowing arbitrage windows between regulated futures prices and offshore perpetual swaps.
As those gaps disappear, so does the need for large allocators to maintain exposure on crypto exchanges simply for access. For institutions that prioritize regulatory clarity and established clearinghouses, CME is starting to look less like an alternative and more like a default option.
Even executives at cryptocurrency exchanges are aware of this. In January, OKX President Hong Fang wrote in a CoinDesk op-ed that crypto derivatives trading could one day rival or even surpass spot volumes on major global exchanges, making regulated US volatility markets an even stronger anchor for bitcoin price discovery around the world.
The institutions that make the decisions
For Naim, the change reflects a broader evolution in the way capital enters bitcoin. What started as grassroots activism by retail traders pursuing BTC as an alternative to Wall Street has been turned on its head, with traditional institutions now calling the shots.
“Today we talk to a lot of sovereigns, a lot of institutions. They go with what they know,” he said, describing allocators who first accessed the asset through spot ETFs before considering more complex strategies.
As institutional positioning carries more weight, bitcoin’s near-term direction increasingly reflects global risk sentiment.
“Yeah [Trump attacks Iran]”Obviously what we’re going to see is that everything will be risk-free,” Naim said, referring to a possible forced regime change in Iran by the United States. “Gold has already started to recover. Stocks will go down. Bitcoin will go down.”
In that framework, bitcoin behaves less like a standalone crypto trade and more like a macro instrument, traded alongside stocks and commodities rather than apart from them.
Naim recognized the irony.
“Bitcoin was all about decentralization,” he said.
But as institutional capital increases and liquidity consolidates within regulated clearinghouses, the infrastructure surrounding the asset becomes increasingly centralized, because institutional money chases risk assets, not risk platforms.
