In 2025, total trading volume in the crypto derivatives market reached $85.70 trillion, with an average daily turnover of $264.5 billion.
In 2025, the global crypto derivatives market underwent a structural transformation, shifting from retail-focused speculation to institutional capital and a more complex risk landscape.
According to CoinGlass's annual Crypto Derivatives Market Report 2025, these 12 months marked a turning point in the emergence of cryptocurrencies as a financial asset class.
The final CoinGlass report notes that demand for hedging, basis trading, and risk management has shifted toward regulated exchange-traded products. These factors strengthened the role of the Chicago futures market, with CME Group cementing its leadership in the Bitcoin futures market, overtaking Binance in open interest in 2024.
By 2025, CME also widened the gap with Binance in the Ethereum derivatives market, demonstrating growing institutional participation beyond Bitcoin.
From a macroeconomic perspective, according to CoinGlass, Bitcoin continued to behave less as an inflation hedge and more as a high-risk asset. During the 2024-2025 monetary easing cycle, BTC rose from $40,000 to $126,000, largely reflecting the use of leverage to benefit from the global expansion of liquidity. As liquidity expectations shifted in late 2025, the correction increased Bitcoin's sensitivity to central bank policy and geopolitical uncertainty.
This created fertile ground for derivatives trading, as volatility associated with US-China trade tensions and the normalization of Japanese monetary policy created sustainable opportunities for hedging and speculative strategies.
Another defining theme of 2025 was the transition of decentralized derivatives from experimentation to genuine market competition.
High-performance application networks and architectures enabled blockchain platforms to compete with centralized exchanges in certain niches, particularly in censorship-resistant trading and combinable strategies.
Overall, 2025 marked the moment when crypto derivatives became a central pillar of global digital finance, rather than a fringe speculative market. Institutional dominance, new regulation, and blockchain innovation are changing the way risks are priced, transferred, and managed, and are setting the stage for an even more complex derivatives landscape in the future, according to CoinGlass analysts.