CME Group will move its regulated cryptocurrency futures and options market to 24/7 trading on May 29, pending regulatory review. The change could weaken Bitcoin’s long-watched CME gap pattern. Traders have waited for the news for years as crypto spot markets are always open, except for CME which used to be closed on weekends.
CME said the new schedule will run through Globex and ClearPort around the clock, including weekends and holidays. Trades made from Friday evening through Sunday evening will carry the next business day’s trade date. The same will apply to clearing, settlement, and regulatory reporting.
Under the old schedule, CME Bitcoin futures stopped for the weekend. During that time, Bitcoin often kept moving on spot exchanges. When CME reopened, the futures chart sometimes showed a gap between Friday’s last trade and the next opening print.
The gap drew heavy attention from traders. Many treated it as a technical marker that the price might revisit later. A March 2025 CoinDesk Research report said 79 of the previous 80 CME Bitcoin futures gaps had filled. That sample pointed to a 98.75% fill rate.
Later research painted a less uniform picture. Broader historical fill rates often landed between 70% and 80%. The pattern still mattered since it came from market structure, not from a mechanical force pushing Bitcoin toward one level.
In practice, the gap formed as one major regulated derivatives venue closed while the underlying asset kept trading globally. Price discovery continued elsewhere during the weekend. Then futures, spot, and basis trades often converged once CME reopened.
A new Quantus report says quantum computing has moved from a general idea to a planning issue for crypto. The report, ‘The State of Quantum: What Crypto Can’t Afford to Ignore’, says more than $2 trillion in digital assets still rely on systems a powerful quantum computer could break.
The report points to Shor’s algorithm as the core threat. A sufficiently large quantum computer could break RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, including ECDSA and Ed25519. Those signature schemes protect Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many other blockchain systems.
Quantus says the industry may need to plan for a timeline near 2030, not a distant future. It cites recent work from Google, IBM, Quantinuum, and other researchers as evidence that error correction, gate fidelity, and resource estimates keep improving.
The challenge looks harder for blockchains than for traditional internet systems. Public keys can remain visible on-chain once exposed. Wallet makers, exchanges, custodians, validators, and governance bodies would all need to coordinate a migration.
Quantus chief executive Christopher Smith said users may face pressure if the industry waits too long. The report also says 2.3 million to 3.7 million bitcoins may be permanently lost as owners no longer control the private keys. Those coins cannot move to quantum-safe addresses.
The technical burden would also be large. A standard Bitcoin ECDSA signature and public key carry about 97 bytes of cryptographic payload. A comparable transaction using ML-DSA-87 carries about 7,187 bytes, or roughly 70 times more. That size increase would add pressure to the block space.
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CME Group’s move to 24/7 crypto trading could reshape Bitcoin’s market structure by reducing the weekend gap that traders have followed for years. At the same time, Quantus warns that quantum computing is becoming a serious long-term risk for blockchain security and future migration planning.