I just noticed a pretty interesting market development. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has decided to provide 24/7 trading of cryptocurrency futures and options starting from May 29, reflecting a surge in institutional investors’ demand for digital asset risk management. Last year, CME’s crypto derivatives trading volume reached $3 trillion—this number alone says everything.

In fact, for a long time there has been a structural contradiction in the crypto market. The spot market runs nonstop for 24 hours, but CME futures are usually closed on Friday evenings due to strict regulation and do not reopen until Sunday. This creates the famous “CME gap”—over the weekend, institutional investors are unable to hedge their risks, and volatility in the retail market is amplified. That’s why you’ll find that weekend price action is often the most crazy, and it’s exactly this situation—the absence of Wall Street indices over the weekend—that is the problem.

CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong has pointed this out as well: the most intense price volatility happens exactly when institutional trading venues are shut down. CME’s move this time is, to a certain extent, a structural acknowledgment of this phenomenon. Adam Haeems, head of asset management at Tesseract Group, believes this closes the last gap between native crypto markets and regulated derivatives infrastructure. With institutional capital flows no longer interrupted over the weekend, the risk and costs of holding positions across the weekend will both decrease.

But this doesn’t mean volatility will disappear completely. Haeems also mentioned a real issue—keeping trading venues open doesn’t necessarily mean liquidity is sufficient. Institutional trading desks may not take on as much risk over the weekend as they do on weekdays, so while the improvement is real, it will be gradual. For retail traders, the good news is that Monday gaps will decrease, and price ranges will become tighter—an obvious signal for traders who track the CME gap.

Interestingly, Maxime Seiler, CEO of STS Digital, mentioned a new application scenario. As other markets close, Bitcoin may increasingly be used as an alternative indicator for macro risk, reflecting global events in real time. This effectively upgrades Bitcoin’s role from a pure asset to a hedging tool.

When it comes to market dynamics, XRP’s recent performance is also worth paying attention to. The current price is around $1.35. Although trading volume and large-holder accumulation provide support, it is still broadly in a prevailing downtrend and has not yet confirmed a sustained bullish reversal. Traders generally focus on $1.37 as the turning point—only if it can break through the $1.40 to $1.42 range would it be expected to show stronger upward momentum. Conversely, if it falls below $1.32 to $1.30, the previous breakout could be invalidated. Recently, Rakuten integrated XRP into its payment app for 44 million users; this is a significant development in the Japanese market, showing that real-world use cases for crypto assets are gradually taking root.