Original Article Title: "CoinGlass Institutional Cryptocurrency Derivatives Report"

Original Source: CoinGlass

In the first half of 2025, the global macro environment remained turbulent. The Federal Reserve paused rate cuts multiple times, reflecting a "wait-and-see tug-of-war" phase in its monetary policy, while the Trump administration's escalation of tariffs and geopolitical conflicts further fractured the global risk appetite structure. At the same time, the cryptocurrency derivatives market continued its strong momentum from the end of 2024, reaching a new all-time high in overall size. After BTC broke its all-time high above $111K early in the year and entered a consolidation phase, the global BTC derivatives open interest (OI) saw a substantial increase, with the overall open interest from January to June jumping from around $600 billion to over $700 billion. By June, although the BTC price had relatively stabilized around $100K, the derivatives market experienced multiple long and short reshufflings, leveraged risks were alleviated, and the market structure was relatively healthy.

This report looks ahead to Q3 and Q4, expecting the derivatives market to continue expanding in scale driven by macro factors (such as changes in U.S. interest rates) and institutional funds. Volatility may remain subdued, but risk indicators need continuous monitoring, maintaining a cautiously optimistic outlook on further BTC price appreciation.

Market Overview

Market Summary

In the first and second quarters of 2025, BTC price experienced significant volatility. At the beginning of the year, BTC price reached a high of $110K in January, then dropped to around $75K in April, a decrease of about 30%. However, with improved market sentiment and continued interest from institutional investors, BTC price surged again in May, reaching a peak of $112K. By June, the price had stabilized around $107K. Concurrently, BTC's market dominance strengthened in the first half of 2025. According to Tradingview data, BTC's market dominance reached 60% by the end of the first quarter, the highest level since 2021, and continued this trend in the second quarter, with market dominance exceeding 65%, demonstrating investors' preference for BTC.

Simultaneously, institutional investor interest in BTC continued to grow, with BTC spot ETFs seeing continuous inflows, and the total ETF assets under management exceeding $130 billion. Additionally, certain global macroeconomic factors such as the decline in the U.S. dollar index and distrust in the traditional financial system also contributed to the attractiveness of BTC as a store of value.

In the first half of 2025, ETH's overall performance was disappointing. Despite briefly reaching a high of around $3,700 at the beginning of the year, it experienced a significant decline thereafter. By April, ETH had dropped to below $1,400, representing a decrease of over 60%. In May, the price saw limited recovery, even in the face of positive technical developments (such as the Pectra upgrade), with ETH only rebounding to around $2,700, failing to reclaim its early-year peak. As of June 1st, ETH's price stabilized around $2,500, nearly 30% down from the beginning of the year, showing no strong signs of sustained recovery.

The divergence between ETH and BTC was particularly notable. Against the backdrop of BTC's rebound and continued increase in market dominance, ETH not only failed to rise in tandem but displayed clear weakness. This was evidenced by a significant decrease in the ETH/BTC ratio, dropping from around 0.036 at the beginning of the year to a low of about 0.017, a decline of over 50%. This divergence revealed a notable decline in market confidence in ETH. It is expected that in the third to fourth quarter of 2025, with the approval of an ETH spot ETF collateralization mechanism, market risk appetite may recover, and overall sentiment is expected to improve.

The overall performance of the altcoin market was even more lackluster. According to CoinGlass data, some mainstream altcoins represented by Solana, despite briefly reaching highs at the beginning of the year, subsequently experienced continuous pullbacks. SOL retreated from around a high of $295 to a low point in April of about $113, a drop of over 60%. Many other altcoins (such as Avalanche, Polkadot, ADA) also experienced similar or even larger declines, with some altcoins dropping from their highs by over 90%. This phenomenon reflects an increased risk aversion sentiment in the market towards high-risk assets.

In the current market environment, BTC's status as a safe-haven asset has been significantly strengthened, transitioning from a "speculative asset" to an "institutional allocation asset / macro asset." On the other hand, ETH and altcoins still primarily focus on "crypto-native capital, retail speculation, DeFi activity," positioning them more similar to tech stocks. Due to decreased fund preferences, increased competitive pressure, and the impact of macro and regulatory environments, the ETH and altcoin markets have shown sustained weakness. Apart from a few public chains like Solana continuing to expand their ecosystems, the overall altcoin market lacks significant technological innovations or new large-scale application scenarios to attract sustained investor attention effectively. In the short term, without strong new ecosystem or technological developments driven by macro-level liquidity constraints, the ETH and altcoin markets will find it challenging to significantly reverse their weak trends, with investor sentiment towards altcoins remaining cautious and conservative.

BTC/ETH Derivatives Position and Leverage Trend

The total open interest of BTC futures reached a new high in the first half of 2025, driven by significant inflows into spot ETFs and strong futures demand. BTC futures open interest continued to rise, surpassing $70 billion in May this year.

Notably, the share of traditional regulated exchanges such as CME has been rapidly increasing. As of June 1st, CoinGlass data shows that CME's BTC futures open interest reached 158,300 BTC (approximately $16.5 billion), leading all exchanges, surpassing Binance's 118,700 BTC (approximately $12.3 billion) during the same period. This reflects institutions entering the market through regulated channels, with CME and ETFs becoming significant contributors. Binance remains the exchange with the largest open interest in the cryptocurrency space, but its market share has been diluted.

On the ETH side, similar to BTC, its total open interest in futures reached a new high in the first half of 2025, surpassing $30 billion in May this year. As of June 1st, CoinGlass data shows that Binance's ETH futures open interest reached 2.354 million ETH (approximately $6 billion), leading among all exchanges.

Overall, in the first half of the year, exchange users' leverage usage tended to be rational. Although the overall open interest in the market increased, multiple violent fluctuations cleared excessive leveraged positions, and the average leverage ratio of exchange users did not spiral out of control. Especially after the market fluctuations in February and April, exchange margin reserves remained relatively abundant, and the leverage ratio indicator for the entire market occasionally reached high points but did not show a sustained upward trend.

CoinGlass Derivatives Index (CGDI) Analysis

The CoinGlass Derivatives Index (CGDI) is an index that measures the price performance of the global cryptocurrency derivatives market. Currently, over 80% of the trading volume in the crypto market comes from derivative contracts, while mainstream spot indices cannot effectively reflect the core pricing mechanism of the market. The CGDI dynamically tracks the market value of the top 100 open interest perpetual contracts of major cryptocurrencies and combines them with their open interest quantity to construct a real-time, highly representative trend indicator of the derivatives market.

CGDI exhibited a divergent trend from BTC price in the first half of the year. At the beginning of the year, BTC surged due to institutional buying pressure, maintaining its price near an all-time high. However, CGDI experienced a downturn starting from February—this decline was driven by the weakness in prices of other mainstream derivative assets. As CGDI is calculated based on the Open Interest (OI) of mainstream derivative assets, while BTC was performing strongly, ETH and altcoin futures did not see a synchronous uptrend, dragging down the composite index. In summary, in the first half of the year, funds notably flowed into BTC, which remained strong mainly due to institutional long-term holdings and the spot ETF effect. BTC's market dominance increased while the speculative interest in altcoins cooled off, leading to an outflow of funds from CGDI and a high BTC price. This divergence reflects a shift in investor risk appetite: ETF optimism and safe-haven demand led to capital inflows into high-market-cap assets like BTC, while regulatory uncertainty and profit-taking put pressure on altcoins and the altcoin market.

CoinGlass Derivatives Risk Index (CDRI) Analysis

The CoinGlass Derivatives Risk Index (CDRI) is a metric that measures the risk intensity of the cryptocurrency derivatives market. It quantitatively reflects the current market's leverage usage, trading sentiment, and systemic liquidation risk. CDRI emphasizes forward-looking risk warnings, issuing alerts ahead of market structure deterioration. Even when prices are still rising, it will indicate a high-risk state. The index conducts weighted analysis across multiple dimensions such as open interest, funding rates, leverage ratios, long/short ratios, contract volatility, and liquidation volume to construct a real-time risk profile of the cryptocurrency derivatives market. CDRI is a standardized risk scoring model ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the value, the closer the market is to overheating or fragility, making it prone to systemic liquidation trends.

The CoinGlass Derivatives Risk Index (CDRI) remained overall at a slightly elevated neutral level in the first half of the year. As of June 1st, the CDRI was 58, placing it in the "Medium Risk / Neutral Volatility" range, indicating that the market was not significantly overheated or in panic mode, with short-term risks under control.

II. Cryptocurrency Derivatives Data Analysis

Perpetual Futures Funding Rate Analysis

The funding rate's fluctuations directly reflect the market's leverage usage. A positive funding rate usually signifies an increase in long positions, indicating bullish market sentiment. Conversely, a negative funding rate may suggest rising short pressure and a shift to cautious market sentiment. The funding rate's volatility signals that investors need to pay attention to leverage risks, especially during rapid changes in market sentiment.

In the first half of 2025, the crypto perpetual futures market overall exhibited a bullish trend, with the funding rate mostly positive. The funding rate of major crypto assets remained positive, consistently above the 0.01% benchmark level, indicating a general bullish sentiment in the market. During this period, investors held an optimistic view of the market outlook, leading to an increase in long positions. As the long overcrowding and profit-taking pressure intensified, BTC saw a peak and pullback in mid to late January, and the funding rate returned to normalcy.

Entering the second quarter, market sentiment returned to rationality, with funding rates mostly staying below 0.01% (annualizing to around 11%) from April to June, and occasionally even turning negative. This indicated the waning of speculative fervor and a trend toward a balanced long-short position ratio. According to CoinGlass data, the number of times the funding rate shifted from positive to negative was very limited, indicating that moments of concentrated bearish sentiment in the market were scarce. When news of Trump's tariffs caused a sharp drop in early February, the BTC perpetual funding rate briefly turned negative, signaling a local extreme of bearish sentiment; in mid-April, when BTC quickly tested around $75K, the funding rate briefly went negative again, showing a clustering of short positions in a panic; and in mid-June, geopolitical shock led to the funding rate falling into negative territory for the third time. Apart from these extreme cases, the funding rate remained positive for most of the first half of the year, reflecting a long-term bullish market sentiment. The first half of 2025 continued the trend from 2024: instances of the funding rate turning negative were few, and each time corresponded to a dramatic market sentiment reversal. Therefore, the number of switches between positive and negative rates can serve as a signal of sentiment reversal—only a few switches occurred in the first half of this year, precisely foreshadowing turning points in the market.

Options Market Data Analysis

In the first half of 2025, the BTC options market saw a significant increase in size and depth, reaching record-high activity levels. As of June 1, 2025, the crypto options market remained highly concentrated on a few exchanges, mainly including Deribit, OKX, and Binance. Deribit, holding over 60% of the options market share, continued to maintain an absolute dominance and remained the primary liquidity hub for BTC/ETH options. Especially in the high-net-worth and institutional markets, Deribit was widely adopted due to its rich product offerings, excellent liquidity, and mature risk management. Meanwhile, Binance and OKX saw slight increases in their options market share. With Binance and OKX continuously enhancing their options product ecosystems, the market share of top exchanges will tend to diversify. However, Deribit's leading position is unlikely to be shaken in 2025. DeFi on-chain protocol-based options (such as Lyra, Premia, etc.) have seen an increase in market share, but the overall volume remains limited.

According to CoinGlass data, the global BTC options open interest reached a historical peak of around $49.3 billion on May 30, 2025. Against the backdrop of a stable spot market and decreasing volatility, the options open interest continued to rise, indicating that investors' demand for using options for cross-period positioning and risk hedging has increased. In terms of implied volatility (IV), the first half of the year showed a trend of initial decline followed by stability. As the spot market reached a high-level consolidation phase, option implied volatility significantly decreased compared to the previous year. In May of this year, the BTC 30-day implied volatility dropped to a multi-year low, indicating limited short-term volatility expected in the market. This contrasts sharply with the massive open interest positions: on one hand, there is a huge volume of option positions, and on the other hand, there is historically low volatility, implying that investors expect prices to trade in a narrow range or adopt seller strategies to earn gains. However, the extremely low volatility itself poses a risk—once a black swan event occurs, it may trigger a sudden surge in volatility and position squeeze. During the geopolitical crisis in June, we did observe a slight uptick in IV and a synchronous increase in the Put/Call ratio to around 1.28, indicating a rise in short-term hedging sentiment. Overall, the average implied volatility of options in the first half of the year remains at a moderate level, without experiencing a sharp increase like in 2021.

Key points of the options market summary: in the first half of the year, options open interest continued to rise, deepening market depth; investors showed strong interest in high-price call options but hedged through put options; implied volatility remained low, and seller strategies prevailed. Looking ahead to the second half of the year, if the spot market breaks out of its range-bound state, implied volatility (IV) may quickly rise, and the options market may experience a new round of pricing reshaping.

III. Analysis of Cryptocurrency Perpetual Contract Liquidation Data

Looking back on the first half of 2025, long liquidation events were particularly prominent. Especially during several market sharp declines, the risk exposure accumulated by long positions was released through centralized liquidation. On February 3, 2025, according to CoinGlass data, a total of approximately $2.23 billion in positions were forcibly liquidated within 24 hours, with long positions accounting for $1.88 billion. Over 729,000 positions were liquidated in this flash crash. This was the largest single-day liquidation event in the first half of 2025, triggered by Trump's sudden announcement of large-scale trade tariffs, leading to market panic selling.

On February 25, a concentrated macro-level negative news outbreak occurred, with Trump confirming tariffs would be implemented as scheduled, U.S. retail giant Walmart warning of future performance slowdown, Federal Reserve meeting minutes turning hawkish, among other intertwined news, exacerbating the already fragile market condition. A sell-off frenzy occurred again in the crypto market, with BTC breaking below the key $90,000 psychological support level and hitting a new low since November of the previous year. The total amount of force liquidation on that day was approximately $1.57 billion, and the liquidation structure was similar to the early February event, with long positions dominating the liquidation. Due to the continued market decline, leveraged long funds accumulated significantly at the peak were liquidated in large numbers. For example, the Bybit exchange was liquidated about $666 million in positions, with nearly 90% being long positions. In terms of assets, besides BTC and ETH suffering significant losses, altcoins experienced even more severe drops—such as Solana, which had peaked in mid-January but had nearly halved in price by the end of February, with the liquidation amount of related perpetual contracts exceeding $150 million. In early March, BTC price briefly dropped to around $82,000, and mainstream coins set new lows for several months.

After hitting the annual low point on April 7, the overall market's long leverage has been mostly cleared out, creating favorable conditions for further upward movement. Historically, after a large-scale liquidation of long positions, the market tends to stabilize due to the release of leverage risk, which is conducive to establishing a bottom. The market then enters a phase of "deleveraging recovery." On April 23, 2025, the cryptocurrency market experienced the largest-scale short squeeze event of the year, becoming one of the most iconic turning points of 2025 so far. On April 22, BTC surged nearly 7% to $93K in a short period, leading to the forced liquidation of over $600 million in short positions, accounting for 88% of the total liquidation that day, far exceeding long position losses. The percentage of major exchange short liquidations exceeded 75%. In a unilaterally fast-rising market, short liquidations can dramatically amplify the upward momentum, creating a "stampede" of short covering. However, from a global perspective, the absolute scale of short liquidations in the first half of the year is usually lower than long liquidations. For example, the scale of the largest short liquidation day (about $5-6 billion) is significantly smaller than the scale of the February long liquidation day ($18.8 billion). This is related to the overall market being in an upward cycle. Long positions are more willing to leverage up and take on larger risk exposures. However, when longs are overly optimistic and leveraged, once key price levels are breached, it can easily trigger a chain reaction of liquidations, leading to a "death spiral" deleveraging market.

In February 2025, Bybit once again pushed full liquidation data to the market and the public through its API, becoming one of the most emblematic recent events in the cryptocurrency derivatives market. The direct impetus for this move was the increasing criticism in the industry about the lack of transparency in exchange data, especially the incompleteness in liquidation data disclosure, which has long led to information asymmetry in the market, affecting the ability of traders to identify and manage market risks. In response to this situation, Bybit took the initiative to enhance the breadth and depth of data disclosure, demonstrating its determination to enhance platform credibility and competitiveness. Bybit's promotion of comprehensive and timely liquidation data disclosure is a significant measure to promote the transparency and standardization of the cryptocurrency derivatives market. Real-time delivery of full liquidation data helps market participants and analysts more accurately assess market risk, especially during periods of intense market volatility, effectively mitigating the risk of misjudgment and trading losses due to information asymmetry. This action sets a good example of data transparency for the entire industry and actively promotes the healthy development of the cryptocurrency derivatives market.

IV. Analysis of Derivatives Exchanges Development

Derivatives Trading Volume Analysis

In 2025, the data shows that the total trading volume of cryptocurrency derivatives exhibited a moderate growth trend compared to 2024, but with significantly increased volatility. Influenced by the global macroeconomic environment, the launch of a BTC spot ETF, and the Federal Reserve's policies, the market activity in 2025 significantly increased. Particularly during intense market fluctuations, the derivatives market saw record-high trading volumes. At the same time, the market structure further concentrated towards top exchanges, with platforms like Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, and Gate holding the major market share. Binance, as a leading platform, continued to solidify its market dominance, with its trading volume far ahead of other cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges. While OKX, Bybit, and other platforms remained competitive, the gap with Binance widened. It is worth noting that since 2024, the participation of regulatory-compliant institutions (such as CME) has increased, driving the institutionalization of the derivatives market. The steady growth in derivatives trading volume reflects the market's increasing demand for risk management and leverage tools but also requires vigilance against liquidity risks in high-volatility environments and regulatory policy changes. Overall, the trading volume in the market is highly concentrated on the top platforms, with the market share of these exchanges continuously increasing, intensifying the Matthew effect. Investor trust is highly correlated with liquidity, making high-quality platforms the preferred venue for mainstream funds and trading activities.

Binance

In the first half of 2025, Binance consistently maintained extremely high daily trading volumes, with multiple days seeing volumes nearly reaching $200 billion. Throughout the entire period, Binance's trading volume remained at high levels of volatility, with frequent occurrences of extreme high values, reflecting the platform's strong market attractiveness and liquidity in all types of market conditions, including significant fluctuations and normal ranges. Particularly noteworthy is that during periods of intense market turbulence (such as sharp price surges or pullbacks), Binance's trading volume significantly increased, indicating that large funds and key users tend to choose the platform with the strongest liquidity for risk hedging and strategic trading during high-volatility conditions.

Binance consistently ranked first in daily trading volume, showing a significant top exchange effect. Compared to mainstream exchanges like OKX, Bybit, Binance's volume advantage is evident, with its share continuously expanding. For most of the time, Binance's individual platform volume has been close to or exceeded the sum of other major platforms. Building upon its high trading volume, Binance has global pricing power for BTC and major derivative contracts, giving it greater influence on market trends and volatility.

OKX

OKX maintained a high overall derivatives contract trading volume in the first half of 2025, with a daily average derivatives contract trading volume of around $300 billion. The volume mostly fluctuated between $200 billion and $400 billion, but there is still a significant gap in volume compared to Binance. OKX's trading volume exhibited noticeable volatility, especially during periods of intense market fluctuations, with several days of significant volume spikes, demonstrating its platform's strong market responsiveness and attractiveness. Most of the time, OKX's trading volume remained within a relatively stable range, but overall, it still slightly lags behind Binance and some fast-growing emerging platforms. This indicates that OKX still has a robust user base and liquidity in the derivatives market, but its high growth momentum is gradually weakening.

In 2025, OKX's strategic focus has clearly shifted from traditional centralized exchanges (CEX) towards Web3 and wallet ecosystems. The explosive growth of OKX Wallet has driven the development of its DeFi, on-chain asset management, NFT, and DApp integration ecosystem, attracting a large number of new users and on-chain asset migrations. However, this has also led to a slowdown in growth of OKX CEX's derivatives trading volume, as some active users and assets have moved to on-chain or multi-chain ecosystems. Although the platform's CEX derivatives trading volume still leads the industry, the growth logic and liquidity landscape are undergoing profound changes. OKX maintained a stable derivatives trading volume in the first half of 2025, but its growth momentum is not as strong as the top platforms. The key variable determining its market positioning in the future is whether it can achieve a new breakthrough through OKX Wallet and other Web3 businesses.

Bybit

In the first half of 2025, Bybit demonstrated robust trading activity in the perpetual contract market. The volume distribution was relatively dense, with no prolonged periods of trading depletion, indicating active user engagement and sustained liquidity. The daily average trading volume ranged from $170 billion to $350 billion. Bybit ranked third in the global perpetual contract market, behind only Binance and OKX, maintaining a market share of around 10%-15%. Its peak trading volume could rival that of OKX during certain periods, highlighting its strong competitiveness in the crypto derivatives market. Although there is still a significant gap compared to Binance, Bybit has a late-mover advantage in retail trading experience, Web3 community influence, and emerging market expansion. Bybit has a higher penetration rate in Europe, America, and Southeast Asia, stronger brand influence, and is poised to continue gaining market share from mid-tier platforms and narrowing the gap with the second-place OKX.

Bitget

In the first half of 2025, Bitget has shown significant growth momentum in the global crypto derivatives market, especially in the perpetual contract trading sector. According to CoinGlass data, Bitget's daily average perpetual contract trading volume has steadily increased to the range of $150 billion to $300 billion, with peaks approaching $900 billion, demonstrating its strong performance in the market. Through a diverse range of perpetual contract underlying assets, the platform has met various trading needs, attracting a large number of young users, especially in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and Latin America. Through localized marketing and brand partnerships, Bitget has enhanced its brand influence and user coverage. Additionally, Bitget has been continuously advancing in technological innovation, optimizing its trading system, enhancing user experience, and further consolidating its market position. Although there is still a certain gap compared to Binance and OKEx, Bitget has become one of the exchanges with the most potential to ascend to the top tier.

Gate

In the first half of 2025, Gate's contract trading section has shown significant growth momentum, with daily trading volume steadily rising to the range of $100 billion to $300 billion, reaching a peak of nearly $600 billion, indicating that the platform's derivatives market trading activity has been consistently maintaining high levels within the industry. From the perspectives of trading volume growth rate and market share expansion, Gate has gradually established a differentiated advantage in the current global digital asset derivatives market competitive landscape, strengthening its influence in emerging markets and among small to medium-sized investors.

The platform has continuously expanded its contract variety coverage, optimized a diverse derivatives matrix including perpetual contracts, options, leverage products, etc., catering to user groups with different risk appetites and investment needs. Although there is still a distance from leading platforms like Binance and OKEx, Gate has become one of the most promising and influential emerging contract trading platforms, drawing significant attention from the industry, thanks to its steady growth and differentiated competitive advantages.

Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid is one of the representatives of decentralized derivatives exchanges (DEXs) that emerged during the period from 2023 to 2025. By the first half of 2025, Hyperliquid's daily average trading volume has steadily surpassed $30 billion, with daily trading volumes exceeding $170 billion during peak periods. Hyperliquid adopts native chain self-developed matching technology to achieve ultra-low latency and high liquidity without the need for oracle settlement, significantly enhancing trading depth and price efficiency.

The month-over-month and quarterly growth rates of Hyperliquid's trading volume are both ranked first in the DEX industry, and key metrics such as active users, TVL (Total Value Locked), and protocol revenue also significantly surpass traditional DEXes. Over the past year, Hyperliquid has achieved explosive growth from a daily trading volume of less than $1 billion to as high as $30-50 billion, a growth rate and speed unprecedented in the DEX space. Hyperliquid currently holds over 80% of the market share in the DeFi perpetual contract market.

Exchange Market Depth Analysis

Market depth is a key indicator that measures the cumulative amount and distribution of buy and sell orders at different price levels in an exchange's order book, directly reflecting the market's liquidity level and trading capacity. For cryptocurrency exchanges, deep market depth can effectively reduce price impact on large trades, minimize slippage, and enhance users' trading experience and cost efficiency. This is particularly crucial for attracting high-frequency traders, institutional market makers, and other professional liquidity providers, as they often need to maintain asset price stability in situations involving large and frequent transactions. Sufficient market depth also lays a foundation for the robust operation of derivative markets such as futures, options, etc., helping to form tight bid-ask spreads, enhance overall market price discovery, and improve risk hedging efficiency.

According to CoinGlass data, among global cryptocurrency spot exchanges, Binance continues to maintain an absolute leading position in BTC market depth. The median order book depth stays in the range of $20-25 million on each side, while Binance's single-side depth of around $8 million holds approximately 32% of the market share, far ahead of the second-placed Bitget (around $4.6 million) and the third-placed OKX (around $3.7 million). Of particular note, only Binance has achieved a depth of over $1 million on each side, while other mainstream exchanges are below $0.5 million. Binance's absolute leadership in BTC market depth truly demonstrates its outstanding liquidity level as the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, while other exchanges such as OKX and Bybit still have room to catch up in market depth and liquidity.

5. Conclusion

In the first half of 2025, the cryptocurrency derivatives market has shown remarkable resilience and structural differentiation amid global macro turmoil and escalating geopolitical risks. On one hand, driven by continued inflows of ETF funds and institutional allocation frenzy, BTC has not only broken through historical highs but also maintained its position at high levels, with the derivatives market size and open interest both reaching new highs. In terms of market structure, the proportion of compliance-focused exchanges such as CME has increased, the ETF effect has further strengthened BTC's positioning as an "institutional asset allocation" asset, driving a profound change in sector risk appetite. On the other hand, ETH and major altcoins have been under pressure from multiple factors such as technology, ecosystem, and fundaments, showing overall weakness, with the ETH/BTC ratio experiencing a significant decline and cautious sentiment in altcoin investment as the sector lacks new technological innovations and application-driven scenarios.

From a transactional perspective, the overall structure of derivative leverage appears to be healthy, with the futures and options markets continuing to expand. Leverage risks have been effectively released after multiple intense market movements, open interest in the options market and liquidity have reached historic highs, and implied volatility remains low, with the long and short forces tending to balance. The options market is active, with both bullish speculation and hedging demand coexisting. In the contradictory situation of high positions and low volatility, market participants still need to be vigilant against the sudden risks of "Black Swan" events. The large-scale liquidation events of long and short positions that occurred by 2025 not only released the market's leverage risk but also laid the groundwork for subsequent price recovery and market stabilization. At the platform level, Binance continues to maintain its global market liquidity and pricing power advantage, while OKX, Bybit, Bitget, and others are strengthening their competitiveness in their respective segmented markets. Decentralized derivative exchanges such as Hyperliquid have shown explosive growth, and the innovative vitality of the DeFi sector continues to be unleashed.

Looking forward to the second half of 2025, the core variables of the market are still macro policies, ETF flows, and risk preference shifts. If there is a substantial adjustment in the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy or the implementation of an ETH spot ETF collateral mechanism, it may become an important catalyst for the restoration of risk preference. Overall, the "macro asset" characteristics of BTC are becoming more prominent, the institutionalization and compliance trends in the derivative market are accelerating, and leading platforms and innovative protocols are continuing to benefit. At the same time, regulatory policies, sudden risks, and liquidity changes remain unresolved structural challenges. Investors need to continuously monitor market leverage and liquidity indicators, dynamically adjust risk exposure, and actively seek a balance between asset allocation and risk hedging amid market cycles and waves of innovation.

This article is a submission and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.

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