CME Group will extend Bitcoin and Ethereum futures to 24-hour trading in early 2026, with regulatory approvals.
The move brings the largest US regulated futures market in line with the constant nature of crypto exchanges. This is a structural change that allows us to reconstruct how liquidity flows between traditional finance and venues from crypto.
CME Futures currently trades on daily maintenance breaks from Sunday to Friday, reflecting the exchange’s stock and product models. This leaves us with a long stretch (Friday night to Sunday afternoon, short weekday suspension) in which the global spot market trades at Binance, Coinbase and Delibit without parallel CME markets.
The results are structural features known as the “CME gap.” Prices will move over the weekend. By 2026, these gaps will disappear or at least lose their predictive power.
CME footprint in Crypto is already important. In the third quarter of 2025, Exchange recorded the second highest quarter for Crypto Futures, reporting it was close to the average daily contract across BTC and ETH.
In particular, for Bitcoin, CME’s share of open interest is consistently ranked in the top five around the world, often capping 20-25% of US futures activities. This is in stark contrast to 2017, when CME launched its first Bitcoin contracts in a market that still dominates unregulated platforms.
Trading these futures 24/7 directly addresses client demand. From asset managers to businesses, traditional institutions have long complained about their inability to hedge risks amongst Crypto’s most unstable windows. Weekend and Asian trading hours.
A CME agreement running in parallel with Binance’s permanent futures or Deribit options allows portfolio managers in New York or London to offset their exposure without the need for an offshore account. It also means that dealers who manage ETF flows with a stable pipeline of US-based Bitcoin demand can maintain a balanced base transaction and arbitrary strategy around the clock.
There are two effects on fluidity.
First, the weekend effect could fade as spot Bitcoin can swing thousands of dollars between Friday’s CME closing and Sunday’s reopening. This reduces the structural volatility premium built into funding rates and options pricing.
Second, the spread between CME futures and Crypto-Native Perps, already one of the market’s main arbitrage transactions, could be compressed as the liquidity of the scheme extends to the time previously discovered.
CME said trading will begin early 2026, subject to regulatory approval. With less than a quarter remaining, there are few short gaps in structural positioning and are not important in tactical flow. The weekend gap and Friday closures will continue to be tracked, but traders are already beginning to price in a world where their features disappear.
The short status quo is unlikely to change market behavior in key ways. However, it always provides final stretches to arbitrage desks and ETF market makers before the times begin.
This is a meaningful change for the Bitcoin market. The CME gap has long been a technical feature of the market, something traders see and often trade. That disappearance would close one of the few remaining structural disparities between institutional and crypto-native markets.
The 24/7 CME agreement will no longer divide Bitcoin into “weekend” and “weekday” liquidity regimes. This is because the same hedge and arbitrage flow that awaits Sunday evening continues to live.
That adjustment could ripple into the pricing model across the market. Options dealers, ETF arbitrage desks and base traders historically incorporated weekend risk into their funding curve.
By early 2026, these premiums are likely to be compressed, narrowing the spread between CME futures and permanent swaps in offshore exchanges.
It also means that it may begin to fade the long-term narrative of weekend volatility (the Bitcoin trend that tends to move most violently when Tradfi is offline), and will be replaced by more continuous price discovery.
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