Bitcoin BTC$63,083.82, once hailed as an anti-establishment asset and antithesis to Wall Street, may now bend to sharp traders from those same floors.

Trading in the leading cryptocurrency is steadily shifting toward CME Group, and the exchange’s move to 24/7 derivatives later this year could cement its role as the dominant venue for institutional crypto risk.

The change removes one of the last advantages held by crypto exchanges: nonstop market access.

“You’ll see more traditional hedge fund managers getting more into the asset class, because they’ll be able to trade it on instruments they know, without having to upgrade their tech or move their signals,” Karl Naim, Chief Commercial Officer at XBTO, told CoinDesk. “Why would they want to take a counterparty risk of an entity they don’t know?”

CME already leads regulated bitcoin futures markets by open interest, and its contracts underpin much of the hedging activity tied to U.S. spot ETFs. Until now, however, trading paused over the weekend, producing the well-known “CME gaps” and leaving institutional investors unable to adjust positions while offshore exchanges continued operating.

Around-the-clock trading removes that constraint. Institutions that once relied solely on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or avoided weekend exposure will be able to hedge continuously, tightening arbitrage windows between prices for regulated futures and offshore perpetual swaps.

As those gaps disappear, so too does the need for large allocators to maintain exposure on crypto exchanges simply for access. For institutions that prioritize regulatory clarity and established clearinghouses, CME begins to look less like an alternative and more like the default.

Even crypto exchange executives are aware of this. In January, OKX President Hong Fang wrote in a CoinDesk op-ed that crypto derivatives trading could one day rival or even surpass spot volumes on major global exchanges, making U.S. regulated volatility markets an even stronger anchor for bitcoin price discovery worldwide.

Institutions calling the shots

For Naim, the shift reflects a broader evolution in how capital enters bitcoin. What began as a grassroots activism by retail traders chasing BTC as an alternative to Wall Street has flipped upside down, with traditional institutions now calling the shots.

“Today we speak to a lot of the sovereigns, a lot of the institutions. They go for what they know,” he said, describing allocators that first accessed the asset through spot ETFs before considering more complex strategies.

With institutional positioning carrying more weight, bitcoin’s short-term direction increasingly reflects global risk sentiment.

“If [Trump attacks Iran], obviously what we’re going to see is that it’s going to be all risk off,” Naim said, referring to a potential forced regime change in Iran by the U.S. “Gold already started rallying. Equities will go down. Bitcoin will go down.”

In that framework, bitcoin behaves less like a standalone crypto trade and more like a macro instrument, priced alongside equities and commodities rather than apart from them.

Naim acknowledged the irony.

“Bitcoin was all about decentralization,” he said.

But as institutional capital scales and liquidity consolidates within regulated clearinghouses, the infrastructure surrounding the asset is becoming increasingly centralized — because institutional money chases risk assets, not risky platforms.

Shares in leading listed cybersecurity companies have fallen since Anthropic’s launch of Claude Code Security on Friday, an AI-powered code vulnerability scanner.

Anthropic launched Claude Code Security on Feb. 20 as a limited research preview. 

Claude can reason like a skilled security researcher

According to the company website, Anthropic’s chatbot Claude “scans your entire codebase for vulnerabilities, validates each finding to minimize false positives, and suggests patches you can review and approve.” 

Claude reasons through code “like a skilled security researcher,” it understands context, traces data flows, and “catches vulnerabilities that pattern-matching tools miss,” before proposing a fix.

Anthropic’s most advanced AI model, Claude Opus 4.6, has already found more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities that have survived decades of expert review, VentureBeat reported on Monday. 

ChatGPT maker OpenAI launched a new benchmark on Feb. 19 to evaluate how well different AI models detect, patch, and exploit security vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Claude Opus 4.6 came out on top. 

Cybersecurity company shares decline 

The top five US-listed information technology security companies by market capitalization have all seen heavy share price declines continue this week. 

Palo Alto Networks, America’s largest cybersecurity company with a market capitalization of $116 billion, saw its stock (PANW) slide almost 9% since the launch. 

CrowdStrike, which provides endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services, had an even greater loss with its share prices tanking 18% since Feb. 20, erasing $20 billion in market cap. 

Meanwhile, California-based Fortinet, which develops and sells security products, lost 9% from its share price (FTNT) over the same period, according to Google Finance. 

Other leading cybersecurity firms, such as Cloudflare and Zscaler, also saw their stocks slide amid the new AI competitor. 

“What you’re seeing today is really the continuation of a panic-driven, narrative-led selloff,” Shrenik Kothari, security and infrastructure analyst at Robert W. Baird, told Reuters. 

Market reactions are not irrational

“These reactions are not irrational,” noted the Kobeissi Letter in a lengthy post on the threat of AI taking over the IT workforce on Tuesday. 

“When AI replicates what workers do, pricing power shifts to the buyer. That is the first-order impact, and it is very real.”

Related: Citrini’s AI doom report sees software, payment stocks tumble 

Analysts at financial services firm Wedbush said the stock sell-off was due to “AI Ghost Trade fears.” They noted that Anthropic’s move into the market reinforces a broader view that cybersecurity will be a key beneficiary of the AI boom, reported Proactive on Tuesday. 

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