CME Bitcoin Futures Traders Makes No Significant Changes in Position, Despite Weak Price Action

A total of 8,680 BTC, worth roughly $2.3 billion at the price of $53k per BTC, is the open interest (OI) on Bitcoin futures on CME Group, as of April 23rd. The OI on CME has declined by roughly 850 contracts as spot prices made a pullback last week. Bitcoin price, however, has reached back above $53,500 to start this week after a pullback to just under $47k on Sunday. Despite the drop in OI, no significant changes were made in the positioning. Other Reportable traders have virtually no short exposure as it remains close to record net-long levels owning over 25% of all long contracts outstanding. Leveraged Fund positioning is about as net-short as it has ever been, with Non-Reportable traders continuing to hover near their average historical positioning. “These conditions have exhibited a bullish statistical edge historically,” states Market Science. Meanwhile, the OI on bitcoin options on CME is currency 1,311 contracts, as per the CME Group. Volume on CME Bitcoin futures, meanwhile, has been on the increase this month. From about $2 billion earlier in April, it has since doubled, as per Skew. Overall, Binance and OKEx record the highest volume and OI in the bitcoin futures market. Overall, centralized exchanges have been seeing immense growth in derivatives volumes. BTC derivatives reached $84 billion in trading volume at its peak, up 922% from June 2020. For now, this growth is limited to CEXs; unlike the volumes on decentralized exchanges that have begun to rival their centralized counterparts, derivatives are not seeing a similar uptrend. According to Roberto Talamas, a researcher at Messari, the exorbitant fees of the Ethereum network are hampering the growth of derivatives trading. However, scaling solutions may prove to be the catalyst needed to make on-chain derivatives trading efficient and scalable, he added. Derivative protocols that have deployed Layer2 solutions have begun to see some signs of growth. dYdX, a decentralized derivatives trading protocol backed by a16z, Polychain, and Three Arrows capital, is one of them which announced Layer 2 cross-margined Perpetuals earlier this month. It then reported $34 million in volume on April 14, up from just $6.2 million just a couple of days before. Soon, others are expected to follow suit.