The CME Group has become one of the key institutional venues for crypto derivatives, offering liquid Bitcoin and Ether futures and options. These contracts are widely used for hedging, ETF settlement, and institutional price discovery. However, CME’s crypto cash-settled futures remain traditional in structure: they expire monthly, require rolling and are not designed for continuous, long-duration exposure. That structural gap is now being addressed by the CBOE Futures Exchange, which has introduced Bitcoin (PBT) and Ether (PET) Continuous Futures.
Traditional futures that CME[1] offers do not provide a derivative product explicitly designed for multi-year holding periods, mainly due to roll risk. CBOE’s continuous futures, launching 15th of December, are long-dated (up to 120 months), cash-settled contracts (available in small size from 0.01BTC) designed to replicate perpetual-like exposure inside a U.S.-regulated futures framework. In essence, the novelty comes in the form of funding rates mechanism, involving periodic payments between buyers and sellers, already familiar to crypto-native traders which are used to perpetual futures as the main product by trading volume. As opposed to the 8-hour funding adjustments 3 times per day in crypto perpetuals, continuous futures have daily funding cash adjustment, determined 1 hour before and paid-out at the end of the trading session (4pm ET), incentivizing price convergence without requiring contract expiration. In short, when futures trade above spot, longs pay shorts. On the other hand, when futures trade below spot, shorts pay longs. The funding is netted with daily variation margin, not charged separately. This daily funding cash payment is determined by the funding rate, which reflects the weighted-average of the variance between futures and the underlying reference rate (CBOE Kaiko Bitcoin Real-Time Rate – “Basis”), computed once per minute throughout the trading day. If the market does not trade, the funding adjustment does not apply, since the funding amount depends on per-minute “Basis” values which cannot be calculated during non-trading hours. Trading hours overlap with the standard Globex futures trading hours (23/5). CME, by contrast, is moving more cautiously as it restructures its infrastructure to support true continuous and potentially perpetual products, aligning with regulatory expectations and its broader systemic responsibilities. CME announced 24/7 trading starting in early 2026 for crypto products, suggesting that the exchange recognizes the demand and competitive imperative.
Continuous crypto futures represent a structural convergence between crypto-native market behavior and institutional futures architecture. By removing expiration/roll friction and adding a transparent funding mechanism, CBOE becomes the first US venue to address a use case that CME’s existing crypto products were never built to serve. For institutional investors, this enables long-term crypto exposure without roll friction, regulated alternative to offshore perpetuals and cleaner basis management for strategic allocations. Singapore Exchange Derivatives (SGX) already debuted “perpetual” futures (22/5) successfully on 24th of November. This is not incremental innovation. However, it is the missing middle layer between traditional futures and crypto perpetuals and a meaningful step toward fully institutional crypto derivatives markets.
[1] CME currently holds $11.3B in BTC futures open interest, out of $60.5B total, making it the largest futures venue by OI (~18.7%), followed by Binance with 10.8B and MEXC with 6.9B. However, Deribit is the most dominant player by far (~83%) looking at the options market, currently holding $46.2B in OI out of $55.8B total. CME trails 2nd with $4.5B, followed by OKX with $3.2B.