President Donald Trump's surprise announcement on strategic crypto sanctuaries sparked a wave of aggressive volatility in the market. Over the past few days, Bitcoin's rapid spikes and drops have had a significant impact on the futures market, driving changes in trading volume, open profits and massive liquidation.
Bitcoin's Enduring Future (PERP) dominates the dominant trading activity compared to quarterly shipping futures. On the day of announcement, the permanent swap volume was one or two orders of magnitude higher than the fixed-expansion future volume.
For example, Binance's permanent BTC contract alone traded for around $42 billion (which is far more than other venues), according to Coinglass data. In contrast, quarterly futures contracts did not reach a volume of more than $200 million.
Data from Coinglass showed that the permanent BTC pair of major exchanges, tens of billions of PERPs in each, account for the majority of 159B+ futures on this volatile day. This disparity underlines traders' support for overwhelmingly permanent swaps due to Bitcoin exposure.
Permanent futures offer greater flexibility and liquidity than quarterly futures. They will never expire, allowing traders to hold their positions without worrying beyond contracts or expiration dates. This makes it ideal for short-term speculation and continuous high-leverage trading. Payment of the funding rate every eight hours is piecing together PERPS to spot prices, but otherwise traders will not face settlement and will attract more participation.
In contrast, quarterly futures have fixed deadlines/settlements. They are used more frequently by long-term hedgers and arbitrators, and are seen as low speculative interest. As a result, Perps has become the “dominant power” of cryptographic derivatives, which routinely account for well over 80% to 90% of Bitcoin futures volume.
Trump's news has sparked extreme volatility that has surged futures trading across the board. The approximately 10% price range of Bitcoin was accompanied by a surge in futures volumes, open interest and trade numbers on major exchanges.
Total BTC futures volume jumped to enormous levels at $150-160 billion (all exchanges) 24 hours (on all exchanges). This was already rising, an increase of over 7% from the previous day's volume for each derivative data. Major venues such as Binance, Bybit, OKX and Bitget all saw record-breaking activities.
For example, Binance's Futures platform processed roughly 17.3 million BTC transactions in 24 hours (single-digit single-digit daily transactions) during the announcement, while Bibit shows that it has around 6.8 million transactions and OKX is around 4.0m. This dramatic increase in trade counts reflects manual traders that are stacked with algorithms and high frequency traders, responding to majute.
The Open Interest (OI) also shook sharply. A quick spike in prices suggests that the OI was initially flat or just a modest change, suggesting that the rally was driven by short-term cover and spot purchases rather than new longs. Many short sellers closed their positions (reduce OI), while a long influx of orders filled their place and at first brought almost net change.
However, as volatility continued, open interest began to rise. Traders have opened new positions to gain momentum and to get on the hedge. Within 24 hours, total BTC futures OI increased from about 5% to 7%, up from about $51 billion to $54.64 billion. After the announcement, open interest has expanded, indicating that additional money has flowed into the futures after the initial shock (as traders are positioned for the next move).
Traders' positioning shifted dramatically before and after the announcement. For most of last week, the emotions were relatively bearish/neutral. Many traders were positioned short in anticipation of a continuous price decline. The fact that a short liquidation ruled the first move (2.4 times the long liquidation of BTC) indicates that traders are expecting a price drop and are not ready for the rally.
Different exchanges had different effects during this disruption, primarily reflecting the customer and mechanism. Binance, the largest crypto futures exchange, was led by incredible activity.
During the surge, Binance's permanent BTC volume ($51 billion) was nearly twice the next big venue. It also maintained the highest open interest (approximately 35% to 40% of the total market). This suggests that Binance Traders (a combination of retailers and large players) is very active and has added a lot to the position.
Meanwhile, due to its schedule, CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) is a regulated venue for futures at the facility – responded very differently. Trump's announcement came on the weekend when CME's Bitcoin futures closed. When CME opened for trading on Monday, it was a dramatic gap.
The CME BTC deal in March opened up about $95,000 (up from about $85,720 at the end of Friday), creating a record gap of over $9,200. This shows how many spot prices have moved tentatively. CME volume and open interest also surged as institutional traders responded to the news, but CME's overall share remains small compared to encryption and native exchanges.
Post-Bitcoin volatility has driven a permanent future record volume.
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