According to Coin Surges on June 10, major changes have occurred in CME’s crypto futures market, with its Bitcoin futures and options structure becoming increasingly compact and cautious, with 80 percent of its nominal exposure set to expire within the next four weeks.
On June 6th, the value of outstanding futures contracts on CME Group was 15.51 billion US dollars, among which 12.42 billion US dollars (80%) of the contracts would expire within one to two months. The value of contracts expiring in two to three months is 2.92 billion US dollars, while the value of contracts expiring more than three months is less than 175 million US dollars.
This extreme recent concentration indicates that institutional participants, including asset management companies and hedge funds, are almost entirely focused on short-term risk exposure. This might reflect a lack of confidence in market positioning and a focus on basis capture strategies closely related to arbitrage with spot ETFs.
Furthermore, if the spot price fluctuates significantly before the July expiration, the market will face a higher risk of volatility, as most of the leverage is currently concentrated on the July expiration contracts.
Futures basis also reveals a lack of directional and aggressive attitude in the market. The annualized premium of one – to two-month contracts is only 0.43%, and the yield of two – to three-month contracts is 0.97%. The yield of contracts expiring for more than six months is at most 2.71%, and the difference between short-term and long-term yields is only 2.3 percentage points. This is the flattest term structure since the beginning of the second quarter of 2025, far below the historical normal level. In trend markets, historically, spreads have typically been 4 to 6 percentage points.
The options data from CME Group also confirm this view. The total outstanding value of options reached 89.87 million US dollars, among which call options were 69.38 million US dollars and put options were only 20.47 million US dollars. The nominal bullish/bearish ratio is 3.4, highlighting that the market generally leans towards upward protection or speculative bets. However, the overall scale is relatively small, indicating that the market’s preference for direction is rather cautious.
In terms of expiration, more than half of the option contracts (48.19 million US dollars) will expire within one to two months. The remaining contracts are distributed over longer terms, including $14.91 million with maturities of four to five months and $16.43 million with maturities of more than six months, which may reflect some of the market positioning for early 2026.
On June 6th, the opening price of Bitcoin was close to $101,551, and the closing price was $104,407. This day marked the end of the consecutive days of rising trading volume after the first week of this month, during which a large number of June futures positions were extended. Meanwhile, the flat basis reflects a broader trend since 2025: the yield gap between futures and spot has been narrowing continuously. This indicates that the traditional spot-futures arbitrage trading, which was once the core pillar of institutional crypto strategies, now has an increasingly lower rate of return.
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