The post CME to start trading crypto futures 24/7: What changes for Bitcoin? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

CME Group will extend its Bitcoin and Ethereum futures to round-the-clock trading in early 2026, pending regulatory approval. The move brings the largest US-regulated futures market in line with the always-on nature of crypto exchanges, a structural shift that could reshape how liquidity flows between traditional finance and crypto-native venues. CME futures currently trade Sunday through Friday with daily maintenance breaks, mirroring the exchange’s equities and commodities model. That leaves long stretches (Friday night through Sunday afternoon, and brief weekday pauses) where the global spot market trades on Binance, Coinbase, and Deribit without a parallel CME market. The result has been a structural feature known as the “CME gap”: price moves over weekends or during CME off-hours often open the week with visible chart gaps that traders anticipate filling. By 2026, those gaps may disappear, or at least lose their predictive power. Graph showing the price of Bitcoin futures and the CME gap from July 2 to Oct. 3, 2025 (Source: TradingView) CME’s footprint in crypto is already material. In Q3 2025, the exchange reported its second-highest quarter on record for crypto futures, with average daily volume near 20,000 contracts across BTC and ETH. For Bitcoin specifically, CME’s share of open interest has consistently ranked in the top five globally, often capturing 20–25% of USD-margined futures activity. That’s a stark contrast to 2017, when CME launched its first Bitcoin contracts into a market still dominated by unregulated platforms. Chart showing the open interest and trading volume for Bitcoin futures on CME from Aug. 21 to Oct. 2, 2025 (Source: CME Group) Making these futures trade 24/7 responds directly to client demand. Traditional institutions, from asset managers to corporates, have long complained about being unable to hedge risk during crypto’s most volatile windows: weekends and Asian trading hours. A CME contract…

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Filed under: News - @ October 3, 2025 4:27 pm