The post How institutions made Bitcoin a weekday market so retail takes on all the weekend risk appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Make CryptoSlate preferred on Bitcoin might trade around the clock, but its liquidity doesn’t anymore. The asset that was supposed to become more resilient after absorbing billions in institutional capital through ETFs has instead developed a split personality, one that looks deep and orderly during New York trading hours and considerably more fragile once Wall Street’s desks go dark. Fresh data from Kaiko published this week quantifies what many traders have felt for a while: the same ETF-driven maturation that deepened Bitcoin’s weekday market has hollowed out its weekend trading, creating a two-tier trading environment where smaller participants absorb a disproportionate share of risk. Since spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024, institutional participation has concentrated during US weekday sessions, pushing the share of trading volume occurring in those hours to roughly 47%, according to Kaiko’s analysis. Weekday volumes now consistently run at double weekend levels, a gap that has widened throughout 2025 and into 2026 as institutional allocations have grown. The promise of a uniform 24/7 market, the feature that was supposed to distinguish crypto from everything else in finance, is weakening in practice because Bitcoin is still open every Saturday and Sunday, while the capital that provides its depth isn’t. BTC still trades 24/7, but serious liquidity is becoming more selective The shift is seen in what traders call orderbook depth, the total dollar value of buy and sell orders sitting within a given distance of the current price. It’s an important measure of liquidity, as it functions as a rough measure of how much selling or buying a market can absorb before the price starts moving against you. Kaiko tracks depth at 1% from the midpoint, meaning all the resting orders within one percent above and below the current Bitcoin price, and that figure varies enormously depending…

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Filed under: News - @ April 11, 2026 1:28 pm