Finance
Crypto’s 24/7 Derivatives Era Is Forcing Traditional Finance To Adapt
Photographer: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg
© 2025 Bloomberg Finance LP
Crypto has always traded on a different clock. Bitcoin does not close for weekends, liquidity does not pause for holidays, and leverage does not wait for clearing desks to reopen on Monday morning. For years, that difference helped separate crypto-native venues from regulated financial infrastructure.
That separation is narrowing. CME Group said its regulated cryptocurrency futures and options will be available for 24-hour, seven-day trading beginning May 29, pending regulatory review, with trading continuing on CME Globex except for a weekly maintenance window. The move is more than an operational extension. It is a sign that traditional finance is being pulled toward the market structure crypto normalized first.
The harder question is not whether institutions can trade crypto around the clock. They already can, through offshore venues, prime brokers, market makers, and liquidity providers. The harder question is whether regulated finance’s clearing, custody, surveillance, privacy, and risk systems can operate in markets where leverage, information, and volatility never really switch off.
Crypto’s 24/7 derivatives era is not simply making digital assets look more institutional. It is forcing traditional finance to become more continuous.
Derivatives are becoming crypto’s institutional layer
The center of gravity in crypto markets has been moving away from simple spot trading for years. Spot markets still matter, especially for retail flows, exchange liquidity, and ETF-related demand. But derivatives are where much of the institutional market now expresses risk, hedges exposure, prices volatility, and manages leverage.
That shift is visible in the data. CCData’s January 2026 Exchange Review reported combined centralized exchange volumes of $5.26 trillion, while spot trading accounted for $1.27 trillion. The implication is clear: derivatives represented the majority of centralized exchange activity that month.
This matters because derivatives do not just reflect price discovery. In crypto, they increasingly shape it. Futures, perpetual swaps, and options influence liquidity, funding rates, volatility expectations, and institutional positioning. When derivatives become the dominant venue for market expression, trading hours become less a convenience issue and more a structural one.
That is why CME’s move is significant. Regulated access is no longer just about listing a bitcoin or ether contract. It is about matching the operating rhythm of the asset itself.
CME also said client demand for digital asset risk management helped drive a record $3 trillion in notional cryptocurrency futures and options volume in 2025. That is not a fringe market asking for extended access. It is a regulated derivatives marketplace responding to institutional demand for more continuous risk management.
Continuous trading still runs into legacy settlement
The tension is that continuous execution does not automatically mean continuous settlement. CME’s model extends trading access, but it still preserves familiar institutional mechanics. Weekend and holiday trades are assigned the next business day’s trade date, and clearing, settlement and regulatory reporting continue to flow through the next business day framework.
That is the bridge traditional finance is trying to build: crypto-speed execution on top of regulated market infrastructure. It is a practical compromise, but also a revealing one. Crypto markets solved for continuous trading first and institutional controls second. Traditional finance is trying to do the reverse.
There are good reasons for that. Regulated derivatives markets cannot simply discard reporting obligations, margin discipline, risk controls, and clearing protocols. Their value proposition is precisely that institutions can trade within a transparent, supervised framework.
But always-on markets compress the time available to react. A move that happens on a Sunday morning can affect collateral needs, counterparty exposures, hedge ratios, and liquidity conditions before traditional workflows fully resume. In that environment, operational readiness becomes part of market structure.
The next competitive edge may not be who lists the product first. It may be who can monitor risk, margin exposure, custody flows, and compliance exceptions in real time without weakening the controls institutions rely on.
Transparency becomes a risk surface
Crypto’s always-on design also introduces a second challenge: information moves continuously too. Public blockchains make settlement visible, auditable, and difficult to falsify. That can reduce certain intermediary risks. But the same transparency can expose flows that businesses would normally treat as confidential.
“It does both simultaneously,” said Natalie Newson, Senior Blockchain Investigator at CertiK, when asked whether public blockchain transparency reduces systemic risk or creates new attack surfaces. “Settlement finality is also publicly auditable,” she said, but “front-running and MEV are persistent issues in blockchain.”
That duality is central to the institutional adoption question. Public auditability is useful when markets need trust in settlement. It is less straightforward when market participants reveal treasury movements, collateral positioning, payroll flows, or supplier payments in real time.
Newson framed the business risk directly. “If your treasury wallet is known, and on-chain, it eventually becomes known, counterparties, suppliers, and competitors can watch your liquidity position in real time,” she said.
For trading firms, that visibility can affect execution. For corporations, it can expose working capital strategy. For institutions, it can turn settlement infrastructure into a source of market intelligence for competitors. In a 24/7 derivatives environment, information leakage does not wait for office hours either.
This is where the conversation moves beyond cybersecurity. The issue is not just hacks, exploits, or smart contract vulnerabilities. It is whether an always-on financial system can protect commercially sensitive behavior while preserving the auditability that makes blockchain infrastructure useful in the first place.
Privacy is becoming part of market infrastructure
The early crypto argument treated transparency as a feature. That was true for open monetary networks and early DeFi systems, where public verification helped establish trust. But what works for a speculative or experimental market does not automatically work for enterprise finance.
“Transparency becomes a structural constraint the moment a business tries to use blockchain for real operations,” said Varun Kabra, Chief Growth Officer of Concordium. “Payroll, supplier contracts, treasury flows, pricing structures, these are not marketing data points.”
That is the institutional bottleneck hiding inside the 24/7 trading conversation. It is not enough for markets to stay open. The systems around those markets need ways to prove identity, authorization, eligibility, and compliance without exposing more information than necessary.
Kabra’s broader point is that the next phase of adoption depends on combining privacy with accountability. “The next phase of adoption won’t come from arguing with regulators,” he said. “It will come from building systems where privacy and accountability coexist by design.”
That logic is already moving beyond financial markets. Concordium’s partnership with the Danish Ice Hockey Union includes a Verified Fan Programme using zero-knowledge proofs and an Agentic Commerce initiative around verified AI agents, showing how users or automated agents could prove access rights or authorization without disclosing unnecessary personal data.
The sports example is not the point. The infrastructure pattern is. As markets become more automated and more continuous, identity and selective disclosure become part of the same control stack as margining, custody, and surveillance.
Traditional finance is learning to operate on crypto’s clock
The obvious reading of CME’s 24/7 move is that crypto is becoming more institutional. That is true, but incomplete. The more interesting reading is that traditional finance is beginning to adopt pieces of crypto-native market structure because client demand, volatility, and liquidity have already moved in that direction.
This does not mean regulated finance will become decentralized. It will not. Institutions still need clearinghouses, custodians, reporting systems, market surveillance, and legal accountability. What changes is the cadence. Risk systems that were designed around market closes and business-day workflows will need to function in a market where exposure changes continuously.
That transition will not happen all at once. Execution hours can expand faster than settlement systems. Trading access can move faster than compliance architecture. Liquidity can move faster than privacy standards. The result is a hybrid market structure: crypto assets trading on a crypto clock, through increasingly regulated venues, with traditional finance rebuilding its control layer around a more continuous environment.
For investors, this means crypto derivatives are becoming more than a trading product. They are becoming the test case for how legacy market infrastructure adapts to always-on finance.
The next phase of institutional crypto adoption will not be defined only by which assets get listed or which venues gain market share. It will be defined by whether the financial system can manage risk, identity, privacy, and settlement at the speed crypto markets already demand.
Nvidia (NVDA) stock has clearly been on every investor’s radar over the past three years.
However, the market’s now moved beyond the usual demand discussions and is now fixated on its tremendous runway.
That changes the dynamic in a big way and will shape the stock’s long-term trajectory, especially since it leaves little room for disappointment.
For context, if you’d invested $10,000 in Nvidia stock and left it for three years, you’d be sitting at a jaw-dropping $52,300.
Nevertheless, a ton of future growth is already priced into the stock, and investors buying Nvidia today are paying roughly 35 times forward non-GAAP earnings, according to Seeking Alpha.
Bank of America analysts just had a fresh read on that opportunity after hosting Nvidia CFO Colette Kress at its Global Technology Conference.
Moreover, Nvidia investor-relations executive Stewart Stecker gave analysts a look at how the tech giant is thinking about demand, supply, and the next product cycle.
For perspective, in one of his recent posts, TheStreet’s resident tech expert and reporter Vuk Zdinjak broke down the AI giant’s biggest announcements from the GTC Taipei event.
During the event, Nvidia confirmed that its new Vera Rubin AI platform has entered full production, backed by hundreds of partners helping ramp up manufacturing across the globe.
Additionally, the RTX Spark was introduced, a new superchip built for Windows PCs, that can efficiently run AI agents and the latest AI models locally.
BofA analysts now view Nvidia as more than just a leader in GPUs.
They paint a picture of a uniquely diversified company, powered by a full-stack approach that continues to widen its competitive edge as AI use cases evolve
Moreover, after sitting down with management, BofA analysts believe the growth runway is expanding.
That compelled the firm to effectively reset its expectations on the stock.
Wall Street price targets for Nvidia stock
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Morgan Stanley set a $288 price target on Nvidia stock. .
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Bank of America set a $350 price target on Nvidia stock. .
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UBS set a $280 price target on Nvidia stock. .
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JPMorgan set a $280 price target on Nvidia stock. .
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Goldman Sachs set a $285 price target on Nvidia stock. .
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Cantor Fitzgerald set a $350 price target on Nvidia stock.
Source: MarketBeat.
Bank of America sees Nvidia’s AI runway getting even wider
As mentioned earlier, BofA analysts feel Nvidia is far from being just a GPU story.
More Nvidia:
Finance
Billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg used mortgages to buy multimillion-dollar mansions. Here’s why that’s a savvy financial decision | Fortune
Even the world’s most affluent people sometimes need a mortgage.
Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, on track to become the first-ever trillionaire (or may already be one), but he’s done one thing most average Americans have to do: take out a mortgage.
The Tesla CEO has taken out several mega mortgages, including $61 million from Morgan Stanley, on five properties in California, according to the Los Angeles Times. That’s barely a drop in the bucket of his now-$703 billion net worth, so it could be difficult to understand why he’d borrow tens of millions of dollars to buy real estate.
But financial experts say taking out a mortgage—even when you could easily pay cash—can actually be a smart wealth strategy.
Why wealthy buyers still take out mortgages
One of the main reasons is that most of the wealth held by UHNW people is tied up in investments, stocks, and bonds, and they don’t keep as much liquid cash on hand.
“Ultrahigh-net-worth individuals think differently about liquidity and leverage,” Miltiadis Kastanis, executive director of sales at Compass, told Fortune. “They’d rather keep their money working for them in investments, businesses—or even art—rather than tying it all up in one property.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s seventh-richest man, has also used mortgages to his advantage. In 2012, Zuckerberg refinanced his Palo Alto home with a 30-year, 1.05% adjustable-rate mortgage, according to CNBC. With such a low rate, the mortgage cost him practically nothing, so it didn’t make sense to have nearly $6 million tied up in a home. Plus, borrowing during the era of ultralow interest rates in the 2010s was especially attractive. Many wealthy buyers locked in mortgages at a much lower rate than today’s.
“If they believe their investments will yield a greater return than the interest they’re paying on a mortgage, it makes more sense to finance the property,” Kastanis added. “It’s less about the cost of the loan itself and more about optimizing where their money is placed.”
Mortgage interest can also be tax deductible on loans up to $750,000 for those who itemize when filing their taxes. While Zuckerberg’s mortgage was more than that, he can likely deduct at least part of his mortgage interest, which further reduces borrowing costs.
“Mortgages also allow for tax optimization in some jurisdictions, as interest payments may be deductible,” Islay Robinson, founder and CEO of mortgage brokerage Enness Global, told Fortune. “And in high-inflation environments, the value of money erodes over time, making it advantageous to borrow now and repay later.”
Celebrities use the same strategy
Many celebrities and wealthy buyers take the same approach.
Take Paris Hilton, who took out a mortgage on the $63 million mansion she bought from Mark Wahlberg in Beverly Hills. Hilton is estimated to be worth between $300 million and $400 million.
What’s even more interesting is that she and her husband, Carter Reum, reportedly took out the loan after they had already bought the 12-bed, 20-bath home, which shows a $43.75 million mortgage with JPMorgan Chase at an interest rate of 5.25%.
“It surprises many people, but it’s actually quite common for the mega-wealthy to take out mortgages—even when they could write a check for the full purchase price,” Evan Harlow, real estate agent at Maui Elite Property, previously told Fortune.
Tax and inflation advantages of taking out a mortgage
Another reason ultrawealthy buyers borrow rather than pay cash is that they often take out loans backed by their investment portfolios. Known as securities-based lending, these loans allow clients to borrow against stocks or other assets without selling them and triggering capital gains taxes. Large banks often promote these types of loans to wealthy clients.
“Rather than selling your public market investments to raise money, borrowing against your assets can allow you to stay the course on your investments, defer taxes, and free up money for other opportunities,” according to J.P. Morgan. “It’s a way to tap into the value of what you own while keeping your financial plans intact.”
Because borrowed money is not treated as taxable income under U.S. law, wealthy individuals can finance spending by taking loans against their assets without triggering income taxes. Analysts often describe the practice as “buy, borrow, die”: accumulate appreciating investments, borrow against them to fund consumption, and ultimately pass those assets to heirs with a stepped-up basis that largely eliminates the accumulated capital gains tax.
What everyday buyers can learn
For billionaires and everyday buyers alike, the decision ultimately comes down to how they want their money working. Is it better to lock it into a house—or invest elsewhere?
“The takeaway for the average buyer isn’t to mimic their precise approach, but to understand the principle,” Harlow said. “Sometimes the smartest financial move isn’t paying everything off, but keeping your money flexible and working for you.”
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on March 9, 2026.
More on luxury housing:
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that he wants his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to cut the office, which has already been significantly scaled back during his second term.
WATCH: Trump says Pulte isn’t ‘permanent’ pick for national intelligence chief after GOP pushback
Trump noted that the size of the office has been “way too high for way too long” and that “if he cut, I wouldn’t mind that.”
“He’ll do a very good job,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he traveled to Wisconsin for an event on agriculture. “He’ll watch it closely, but Bill Pulte is very good, he’s very talented.”
The Republican president said in an earlier interview with The Wall Street Journal that he has asked Pulte to start the process of firing employees. In the interview, Trump said he has already conveyed his view to Pulte, who has served as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency but has no apparent national security expertise.
“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, which the Journal said was in reference to intelligence community officials who had served in the Democratic administrations of Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
Trump told the Journal that he wants Pulte to “start the process” of firing personnel and that the eventual permanent director of national intelligence should continue it. The president has indicated that he would not formally nominate Pulte for the position.
“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” Trump said. “Because, if he (Pulte) reduced the size, in conjunction with me … and in conjunction with possibly the person coming in … he can do a lot of the hard work and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in.”
Pulte was tapped by the president earlier this week in a surprising move that has been met with bipartisan resistance in the Senate, which confirms presidential nominations. The temporary appointment has now snarled the renewal of a critical national security surveillance program on Capitol Hill, with Democrats key to the vote pointing out that they did not trust Pulte — whose office oversees 18 intelligence agencies — to help administer the surveillance program.
Trump told reporters on Air Force One that Pulte will stay in the position depending on how long it takes to get his successor confirmed. The president also said he was considering five people who were “all very good, all people that you know very well, all people that do that kind of thing.”
“They’re very respected people,” Trump said of his intelligence candidates, without naming them.
Under Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI office had already taken steps to scale back its size. In August, the Trump administration said that the office’s budget would be cut by more than $700 million per year, while slashing the size of its workforce.
At the time, Gabbard said the office had become “bloated and inefficient” while she announced the roughly 40% workforce reduction.
Gabbard resigned last month after revealing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Kim reported from Washington.
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