Bitcoin once hailed as an anti-establishment asset and anti-Wall Street, may now bow to sharp traders from the same floors.
Trading of the leading cryptocurrency is steadily shifting towards 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 removes one of the last advantages of crypto exchanges: nonstop market access.
“You’re going to see more traditional hedge fund managers getting more into the asset class because they’re going to be able to trade it on instruments they know without having to upgrade their technology or move their signals,” Karl Naim, Chief Commercial Officer at XBTO, told CoinDesk. “Why would they want to take a counterparty risk on an entity they don’t know?”
CME already runs regulated open-interest bitcoin futures markets, and its contracts underpin much of the hedging activity associated with US spot ETFs. Until now, however, trading paused over the weekend, creating the familiar “CME gap” and leaving institutional investors unable to adjust positions while offshore exchanges continued to operate.
Intraday trading removes that restriction. Institutions that once relied solely on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or avoided weekend exposure will be able to continuously hedge and tighten the arbitrage windows between the prices of regulated futures and offshore perpetual swaps.
As these gaps disappear, so does the need for large allocators to maintain exposure to crypto exchanges just to gain access. For institutions that prioritize regulatory clarity and established clearinghouses, CME is starting to look less like an alternative and more like the default.
Even crypto exchange leaders are aware of this. In January, OKX President Hong Fang wrote in a CoinDesk statement that crypto derivatives trading could one day rival or even surpass spot volumes on major global exchanges, making US regulated volatility markets an even stronger anchor for bitcoin price discovery worldwide.
Institutions that do
For Naim, the shift reflects a broader evolution in how capital enters bitcoin. What began as grassroots activism by retailers chasing BTC as an alternative to Wall Street has been turned on its head, where traditional institutions are now at work.
“Today we’re talking to a lot of the sovereigns, a lot of the institutions. They’re going by what they know,” he said, describing allocators who first gained access to the asset through spot ETFs before considering more complex strategies.
With institutional positioning weighing more heavily, bitcoin’s short-term direction increasingly reflects global risk sentiment.
“If [Trump attacks Iran]what we’re going to see, of course, is that it will be out of any risk,” Naim said, referring to a potential forced regime change in Iran by the U.S. “Gold has already started to rally. Stocks will fall. Bitcoin will fall.”
In that framework, bitcoin behaves less like a stand-alone crypto trade and more like a macro instrument, priced alongside stocks and commodities rather than separately from them.
Naim recognized the irony.
“Bitcoin was about decentralization,” he said.
But as institutional capital scales and liquidity consolidates within regulated clearinghouses, the infrastructure around the asset becomes increasingly centralized – because institutional money chases risky assets, not risky platforms.
