On Friday, global markets will face a trillions-of-dollars quarterly derivatives event known as quadruple witching.

The event occurs on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December, when four major types of derivatives expire simultaneously. These include stock index futures, stock index options, single-stock options, and single-stock futures.

Because traders must close, roll or settle these positions simultaneously, trading activity often surges, and price swings can intensify in the traditional markets.

Exact figures for the March 2026 expiry have not yet been published, though recent events illustrate the scale. In March 2025, roughly $4.7 trillion worth of equity and index derivatives expired during the quarterly event. According to TradeStation, that session saw the highest S&P 500 trading volume of the entire year, while other witching days also recorded above-average activity.

Large expiries like this often force institutions to rebalance portfolios, unwind hedges and adjust risk exposure within a short window. Much of the activity tends to concentrate in the final hour of trading, when liquidity spikes and volatility can increase rapidly.

This quarter’s expiration arrives during an already volatile trading environment. Conflict in the Middle East recently pushed oil prices to $120 per barrel, while gold slipped below $4,600 and bitcoin fell below $69,000. Meanwhile, the VIX volatility index jumped above 35 last week, the highest level in a year, signalling heightened stress in financial markets.

Although quadruple witching originates in traditional finance, it can spill into crypto markets. Bitcoin increasingly trades alongside broader risk assets, meaning sharp moves in equities often ripple into digital markets.

Cole Kennelly, CEO of Volmex Finance, said tomorrow’s event could drive volatility in crypto markets, noting that “quadruple witching could trigger a spike in cross-asset volatility as large derivatives positions expire. This may already be showing up in crypto, with the Bitcoin Volmex Implied Volatility (BVIV) Index trending higher into the event.”

How did bitcoin perform on quadruple witching days in 2025

On March 21, bitcoin was slightly down on the day, but the more significant move came later, with prices bottoming a few weeks afterward around $76,000 following the market reaction to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

On June 20, bitcoin declined 1.5% and continued drifting lower, reaching a local bottom near $98,000 just two days later. On September 19, Bitcoin fell over 1% on the day, but the real move unfolded in the following week, with a sharp drop from $177,000 to $108,000. Then, on December 19, bitcoin finished roughly 3% higher at around $85,000, though it remained in a broader drawdown from the October highs.

While price action on the day itself tends to be relatively muted, a consistent pattern of weakness emerges in the days to weeks that follow.

Even if the quad-witching doesn’t add to bitcoin’s volatility on Friday, crypto traders have another event, specifically for digital assets, to keep in mind.
Crypto derivatives face their own major quarterly expiry the week after, on March 27, with $13.5 billion set to expire on Deribit, where positioning points to elevated demand for volatility strategies rather than strong directional bets.

Exchange giant Coinbase’s (COIN) asset management arm is bringing its bitcoin yield fund onchain, creating a tokenized share class of the fund with $3.5 trillion fund administrator Apex Group.

The Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, managed by Coinbase Asset Management (CBAM), will be available to investors on the Base network, Coinbase’s blockchain built on Ethereum. Apex remains the transfer agent, keeping records aligned with the fund’s net asset value.

The launch comes as global asset managers are looking at tokenization as the next frontier in how capital markets evolve, making bonds, equites and funds tradable on blockchain rails. Firms including BlackRock (BLK), Fidelity and Franklin Templeton have introduced tokenized funds in recent years, aiming to speed up settlement times, cut costs and open new distribution channels.

Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, said the company’s asset management business already has a lot of institutional capital allocated, with many investors holding core positions in bitcoin and ether.

“Incrementally, we’re getting new capital coming to the space that wants the ability to get compounded returns, so their bet isn’t just on the appreciation of bitcoin, but while they’re waiting for it to rise in price, they’re earning yield along the way,” he told CoinDesk.

“The bitcoin yield fund allows them to do that by virtue of doing things like selling call options or participating in lending arrangements.”

Tokenized assets are potentially a multiple-trillion-dollar market, with estimates ranging from McKinsey’s projection of $2 trillion by 2030 to BCG and Ripple’s $18.9 trillion target by 2033.

Apex, a significant player in the fund service business supporting $3.5 trillion in assets, is increasingly leaning into tokenization as well. It acquired Tokeny last year, a specialist that facilitated the tokenization of over $32 billion in assets. Apex also said it plans to tokenize $100 billion in funds using the T-REX Ledger by June 2027 to manage ownership and compliance across multiple blockchains.

In the case of the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, the tokenized share class uses the ERC-3643 token standard, which encodes investor checks directly into the token. Only approved investors can hold or transfer the asset, with identity tied to each wallet through a dedicated onboarding process.

The setup replaces manual compliance checks with automated rules. If a wallet is not cleared, the transaction fails. That could reduce friction in how institutional investors access and move fund positions.

The fund is available to non-U.S. investors, but CBAM said it plans to create a tokenized share class of the fund’s U.S.-version as well.

Prediction market provider Kalshi may be hit with a temporary restraining order from the state of Nevada after a federal appeals court declined to block such a motion on Thursday.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist order in March 2025, ordering it to stop offering sports-related prediction market contracts. However, Kalshi said a later temporary restraining order application by Nevada “sought to prohibit Kalshi from offering all its event contracts.” Kalshi tried to move the case to federal court, but the case was set to go back to a state court if the appeals court did not grant it an administrative stay.

On Thursday, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel denied Kalshi’s motion for an administrative stay in a federal case, clearing the way for the case to get thrown back to a state court.

In its appeal filed on March 13, Kalshi warned that it “faces imminent harm” if the appeals court did not grant its motion, as “the state court proceedings would undermine Kalshi’s appellate rights in this appeal” and a related action.

The platform said that it might find itself litigating the same issue — namely, the question of whether state regulators in Nevada have any jurisdiction — in four different venues, including a Nevada state court, Nevada federal court and two different appeals court cases.

“Allowing that to happen would create an untenable risk of subjecting Kalshi to conflicting federal and state court decisions,” the filing said. “For example, the state court could enter judgment against Kalshi, finding that the CEA does not preempt state gambling laws, while this Court in Assad [another case] arrives at exactly the opposite conclusion.”

Dan Wallach, a gaming lawyer, said in a post on X that a temporary restraining order would push Kalshi out of Nevada entirely for at least two weeks, pending a hearing on a preliminary injunction.

The temporary restraining order could come in the next day or so, he said.

Kalshi and other prediction market providers are facing pushback in over a dozen state actions, with state-level regulators arguing that they have jurisdiction over at least sports-related betting products. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has argued that it has sole jurisdiction over prediction market providers, and filed an amicus brief in one of the federal cases to defend that position.

The CFTC even signed a memorandum of understanding with Major League Baseball, announced at the same time as MLB’s announcement it had partnered with Polymarket.

The negotiation to get a crypto market structure bill through its next stages in the Senate have hovered over an almost-there status for weeks, and Republican lawmakers met on Thursday to figure out how to bridge the final gaps.

The White House was expected to get some updated legislative language on Thursday, reflecting the ongoing work on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, according to people familiar with the situation. But the talks are still going, and even if the previously uncertain senators (such as Republican Thom Tillis) become satisfied with the bill’s stablecoin yield treatment, other distinct compromises (such as the approach to decentralized finance) also need to be secured before the Senate would be able to send the crypto industry’s top policy priority to President Donald Trump for a signature.

The longstanding debate that had focused on stablecoin yield — on which bankers and crypto businesses have been divided over the structure of stablecoin rewards programs — is close to a finish, the people said, though lawmakers have been discussing what else the community bankers might be offered to get their support while resolving some of their other priorities. That could include some unrelated provisions tied to Congress’ recent housing legislation, according to reporting from Politico.

Officials from Trump’s administration were said to be involved with the meeting of Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee, which is the second panel that needs to advance the bill before it would be repackaged into a final version that can get a vote of the overall Senate. Even if the effort advances from the committee by the end of April, as Senator Cynthia Lummis predicted this week, a couple of further hurdles may be out of lawmakers’ hands.

Democrats involved in the talks have said they still want senior government officials and lawmakers from profiting off of personal crypto interests — most pointedly aimed at Trump. And they want Democrats appointed to the party’s vacant seats at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission before the agency adopts new crypto rules. Those are both points that could require concessions from the White House, and crypto insiders are expecting those controversial points to be the last matters settled once the lawmakers are working on a final bill.

On the yield issue, Lummis has said that stablecoin rewards programs that steer clear of bank-line language on savings and interest may survive the compromise, insisting they’re more akin to credit-card rewards than interest from bank-account deposits.

Lummis said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose opposition to a previous draft bill helped derail an earlier effort to get to a Senate hearing, has been more flexible in recent talks. The company didn’t immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment on its position.

As Congress works, the Securities and Exchange Commission spent much of the week issuing and discussing new crypto policy points, including a first-ever taxonomy that sets out regulatory definitions for U.S. crypto assets. In a CoinDesk op-ed on Thursday, Chairman Paul Atkins and the two Republican commissioners suggested they’re eager to have a new law back up the policy they’re working on.

“Only Congress can rewrite the law, and we stand ready to work with [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] Chairman Michael Selig to implement the CLARITY Act,” they wrote. “In the meantime, we are providing the responsible regulatory approach that markets demand.”

JPMorgan cuts its S&P 500 target and warns investors are dangerously complacent about Iran war risks, oil above $110, and the hit to growth, earnings, and stocks.

JPMorgan became the latest — and most prominent — Wall Street institution to sound the alarm on Thursday, cutting its year-end S&P 500 price target from 7,500 to 7,200 and warning that equity markets are making a “high-risk assumption” by pricing in a quick resolution to the Middle East conflict. The downgrade, issued as Iranian strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure sent Brent crude surging above $110 per barrel, signals a growing conviction among institutional analysts that the war’s economic fallout has been systematically underpriced.

“We believe the market is pricing in a quick end to the Middle East conflict and reopening of the Strait, giving a low probability to a potential demand hit,” JPMorgan wrote in its note. “This is a high-risk assumption given that S&P 500 and oil correlations typically turn increasingly more negative after a ~30% oil spike.”​

Oil prices have surged more than 46% since the U.S. and Israel launched their initial strikes on Iran, yet the S&P 500 has fallen less than 4% — a divergence that JPMorgan’s strategists view as a sign of dangerous market complacency rather than genuine resilience. While high-risk segments such as software stocks, South Korean equities, and crypto have sold off, broad equity positioning has barely shifted, with investors hedging rather than derisking in earnest.​

The bank’s core warning centers not on inflation — the conventional oil shock narrative — but on demand destruction. JPMorgan argues that if the supply disruption persists, “GDP, demand, and revenues will adjust lower through forced demand destruction.” The bank estimates that each sustained 10% increase in oil prices shaves 15 to 20 basis points off GDP growth. If Brent holds near $110, consensus S&P 500 earnings estimates could fall by 2 to 5%.

The structural supply picture compounds the concern. Oil supply shut-ins have already climbed to 8 million barrels per day — the highest on record — and JPMorgan warned that cuts could reach 12 million barrels per day, equivalent to roughly 11% of global production.​

The wealth effect adds a secondary channel. With U.S. households holding over $56 trillion in stocks and mutual funds, a sustained equity drawdown would feed back into consumer spending — JPMorgan estimates a 10% drop in the S&P 500 could reduce U.S. consumer spending by approximately 1%. “The combined impact of persistently high oil prices and a bear market in the S&P 500 has a detrimental effect on demand, significantly amplifying the negative impact on growth,” the bank concluded.​

If the S&P 500 selloff extends below the 200-day moving average near 6,600, the bank said meaningful support may not emerge until the 6,000–6,200 range. For now, with the war entering a dangerous new energy-infrastructure phase and no diplomatic off-ramp in sight, JPMorgan’s revised target may prove optimistic rather than cautious.

US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins has clarified how the agency intends to approach digital asset regulation following an interpretative notice issued this week.

In prepared remarks for a Thursday speech at the Practising Law Institute, Atkins said that the SEC would take a different approach to digital assets than its previous “regulation by enforcement” campaign. According to the SEC chair, the agency would first focus on its interpretation of how federal securities laws apply to crypto following the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last week.

“[…] While the interpretation provides long-needed clarity, I should like to assure this audience that it amounts to a beginning, not an end,” said Atkins.

The agency’s interpretation, released on Tuesday, specified that most cryptocurrencies were likely not securities under federal law, with the chair telling attendees at the DC Blockchain Summit that “only one crypto asset class remains subject to the securities laws” under the agency’s interpretation: namely, “traditional securities that are tokenized.”

Atkins later clarified that digital commodities, digital tools, digital collectibles including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and stablecoins were digital assets typically not falling under the SEC’s purview.

Related: SEC gives go-ahead to Nasdaq for tokenized trading trial

While the SEC interpretation could significantly change how the agency approaches crypto regulation and enforcement, a market structure bill working its way through Congress is also expected to give the CFTC more authority in regulation and oversight of digital assets. The bill, called the CLARITY Act when it passed the House of Representatives in July 2025, had not been scheduled for a markup in the Senate Banking Committee as of Thursday.

White House meets with US lawmakers behind closed doors

A spokesperson for Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis confirmed with Cointelegraph that Republican senators met with White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt on Thursday to discuss advancing the market structure bill. While the Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its version of the legislation in January, concerns over how to address stablecoin yield in the crypto and banking industry have effectively stalled progress in the Senate Banking Committee.

According to Lummis’ team, the meeting was “very productive and positive,” adding that lawmakers were “99% of the way there on stablecoin yield,” and “negotiations on the digital asset portions of the bill are in a good place.”

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