Crypto Derivatives Hit $85.7 Trillion in 2025 as Binance Tightens Its Grip on the Market
Crypto derivatives trading didn’t just “grow” in 2025 – it reached a scale normally associated with major traditional markets, with about 85.7 trillion in cumulative annual turnover reported by Coin glass, or roughly 264–265 billion per day on average.
Meanwhile, the market actually became even more top-heavy: Binance processed about $25.09 trillion in derivatives volume in 2025 — roughly 29.3% of global activity.
1) What does “crypto derivatives” actually include?
Derivatives: contracts whose value is derived from an underlying asset, such as BTC, ETH, SOL, etc. Now, the big buckets in crypto are:
A) Futures-dated
A contract for the purchase/sale of an asset at some future date for a specified price. Traditional futures, such as those on CME, expire weekly, monthly, quarterly.
B) Perpetual futures (“perps”)
Crypto’s flagship product. A future-like contract with no expiration date. In lieu, it uses a mechanism called funding rate to keep the perp price near the spot price.
Perps are popular, given that they’re:
Easy to trade like spot
Highly liquid in major exchanges
Easy to use with leverage
Always “on,” matching crypto’s 24/7 market
C) Choices
Contracts that give the right-but not the obligation-to buy or sell at a strike price before a date. Options are one of the financial instruments most heavily utilized by sophisticated traders for hedging volatility and creating structured strategies.
Important: When people refer to a huge annual figure such as $85.7T, they are normally talking about notional traded volume / turnover, i.e., the face value of contracts traded over time summed across venues and days.
That’s different from:
Open Interest (OI): how much is currently outstanding (a “stock” measure)
Market cap – coin value
Exchange reserves: Holdings on exchanges
Spot volume is the act of buying/selling actual coins.
Turnover can be enormous even if “real money at risk” is smaller, because contracts can be opened/closed repeatedly and churned by high-frequency strategies.
- Making sense of the $85.7 trillion figure
CoinGlass’ annual report pegs the 2025 crypto derivatives turnover at ~$85.7T, averaging ~$264.5B/day.
That number sounds surreal until you account for three structural features of crypto:
(1) Crypto derivatives dominate trading activity
In many periods, derivatives volume significantly outstrips spot volume for the following reasons:
Perps are the default instrument for speculation
Margin efficiency is what many traders would want.
Large players hedge by futures instead of selling spot
(2) Gearing magnifies turnover
When one is trading with 10x leverage, he or she is transacting a notional exposure far above his or her posted collateral. The turnover figure tracks that notional exposure changing hands.
(3) 24/7 market + low friction = high churn
Crypto markets never close, and strategies can rebalance, funding rates incentivize constant repositioning, and liquidations forcibly close positions — which ever increases the “trade count” and turnover.
So, here: $85.7T is best viewed as representative of “how intensely the market traded”, rather than “how much cash entered crypto.”
3) Why 2025 was a breakout year for derivatives
The CoinGlass framing and most of the coverage that followed actually talked about 2025 as the year in which crypto derivatives increasingly took on many of the characteristics of a mature, natural risk-transfer layer rather than a casino product.
Key forces:
A) Institutional pathways expanded
Institutions in general have need of
Recognizable places
Clearer compliance frameworks
Liquid hedging instruments
On parallel, for the year 2025: traditional finance further steps into crypto trading and infrastructure, while major banks also consider broader crypto offerings, including derivatives, where there is client demand.
B) More hedging, basis trading, and “carry” strategies
As markets deepen, more volume comes from:
Hedgers( miners, treasuries, market makers, funds)
Basis traders (capturing futures vs spot spreads)
Flows related to ETFs, when applicable, plus volatility and funding arbitrage
That sort of flow is less “headline-grabbing” than memes, but it can generate huge turnover.
C) Volatility-leverage feedback loops
Derivatives feed on volatility-and can also fuel it. Large abrupt price movements can lead to liquidations, also known as avalanches of forced selling/ buying, further raising volume.
Financial Times analysis has recently underlined how leverage is a fault line in crypto: cross-margining, rehypothecation, and opaque collateral chains can make markets fragile during fast moves.
4) Binance’s ~30% share: why “liquidity gravity” matters
According to CoinGlass data, Binance is estimated to hold a derivatives volume of ~$25.09T by 2025 and capture a share of ~29.3%-an unusually large concentration in the world’s marketplace.
The “liquidity gravity” flywheel
In derivatives, everything is about liquidity. The more active the venue is:
the tighter its spreads
the deeper its order book
the lower its slippage
the more reliable its execution during volatility
Attracts in:
Market makers want flow.
large traders who require depth
arbitrators who want tight spreads
Retail traders – those who chase low fees and fast fills.
And that activity reinforces the venue’s dominance.
Product breadth and market coverage
A leading derivatives venue normally prevails by offering:
many eternal couples
high leverage – where allowed
Cross-margin and portfolio margin options
Strong API and colocation-style infrastructure for HFT
multi-tiered fee structure for VIPs and market makers
Binance has historically leaned hard into this kind of playbook, and the share number suggests it worked in 2025.
5) “Tightens its grip” – What that might mean in practice
That’s actually a headline idea about market structure: Binance isn’t just big; it’s increasingly central to how prices, liquidity, and liquidations propagate.
There are a few ways an exchange tightens control without doing anything dramatic.
A) Become the main price discovery venue
When most volume trades in one place, that venue’s order flow becomes a major source of “truth” for short-term pricing, which then spills into:
other exchanges through arbitrage
DeFi perps
Liquidations and risk engines
Indirectly, the providers of index and oracle designs.
B) Pulling activity from rivals through incentives
Exchanges compete by:
discounts on fees
manufacturer rebates
competitions trading
VIP programs
better collateral terms and margin efficiency
Even tiny changes can shift enormous flows when traders are running systematic strategies.
C) Outliving competition during stress events
In derivatives, trust during chaos is a competitive moat.
Does the matching engine stay up?
Are liquidations orderly?
Do mark prices behave?
Are the withdrawals stable?
How much liquidity exists to support significant position unwindings?
If traders think one venue handles volatility better, they focus their attention there, and that further raises that venue’s share.
- The market is also concentrating beyond Binance
Some reporting on the CoinGlass figures points out that a few major offshore exchanges taken together account for a very large chunk of global derivatives turnover-a common frame is that the “top four” hold this concentration.
This concentration matters because derivatives markets are network-effect businesses:
liquidity begets liquidity
cost-increasing fragmentation
Concentration increases systemic importance of top venues
That’s the same dynamic one would see with traditional finance-major exchanges, along with major clearinghouses-but crypto’s nature of 24/7 and leverage intensity make stress propagation faster.
- Where does CME fit into this story?
Even while Binance dominates global turnover, 2025 also saw repeated commentary that CME’s role in crypto price/risk transfer grew, reflecting institutional participation in regulated venues.
This isn’t a contradiction; it’s a segmentation story:
Binance & large offshore venues: huge retail + international speculative flow, perps, altcoin breadth
CME: institution-heavy, regulated futures, often tied to traditional prime brokerage workflows and compliance constraints
Which, in practice can have the form:
Binance Dominates Total Activity
CME capture of key “institutional benchmark” flows or particular contracts
Options venues-such as major options exchanges in crypto-pushing the volatility markets
This is one reason 2025 might be termed “institutionalizing,” even if offshore exchanges still lead in overall turnover.
8) Why derivatives volume growth is a double-edged sword
The good
- Better price discovery
Deep derivatives markets can make pricing more efficient, especially when the spot markets are fragmented.
- Better hedging tools
Miners, treasuries, funds, and even long-term holders can hedge downside without selling spot.
- More sophisticated structure of the market
The more hedging and arbitrage become mature, the tighter spreads and more stable markets you get during normal times.
Risky
1) Liquidation cascades
High leverage means forced closures can avalanche in flash-crash dynamics.
2) Hidden interconnectedness
Collateral practices, cross-margining, and leverage-on-leverage create systemic fragility; leverage has been identified as one of the main crypto fault lines.
3) Concentration risk
When one venue processes ~30% of global turnover, it is:
uptime
The risk engine
liquidation logic
collateral policy changes
even, changes in fees.
This can ripple through the entire market.
- What this means for traders-specially retail
If you’re trading perps or futures, the “big picture” numbers translate into very practical takeaways.
A) Liquidity is your friend – until it isn’t
On the biggest venues you often get the
Tighter spreads
less slippage
Better fills
But in fast crashes, the very same liquidity hub may become the epicenter of forced flows.
B) Funding rates aren’t a detail, they’re the rent you pay
Adverse funding over time can quietly drain accounts by perps, even if you “called the direction” correctly for a while.
C) Better risk management than prediction
In a market where annual forced liquidations can be huge, and some summaries of CoinGlass data also underline, the edge often comes from:
position sizing
Avoid over-leverage
stop discipline
Not using cross-margin casually
Trade mechanics: mark vs last price understanding
- What this would mean for the industry in the year 2026
The figure of $85.7T is less important than what it signals: crypto derivatives have become a core financial layer.
Here are the most probable “what comes next” themes:
A) More regulation, more institutional participation
As frameworks mature, you typically see:
more compliant access rails
Stronger control expectations
clearer rules on leverage, disclosures, and custody arrangements
The broader crypto industry is already behaving like it expects this, with major deal activity and consolidation narratives in 2025.
B) Competitive pressure on fees and margin efficiency
The next battleground is often: margin terms portfolio risk offsets Collateral flexibility means the type of assets to be posted. Quality of execution C) Growth of on-chain/perp alternatives These DeFi derivatives venues and application-specific chains are looking to compete on transparency and composability; however, the majority of the volume today still remains with centralized exchanges. D) Systemic risk discussions will not disappear Expect more scrutiny from journalists, policymakers, and risk professionals — as leverage-based products proliferate — given flash crashes and liquidation events. 11) Summary The $85.7T derivatives turnover in 2025 tells you crypto trading is increasingly derivatives-led, high frequency, and leverage-heavy. Binance’s ~$25.09T and ~29.3% share consequently indicate that the market is highly concentrated, with one venue acting as a global liquidity hub. In short, the same dynamics that make the derivatives market efficient, namely liquidity, leverage and tight spreads, are exactly the ones that will make them fragile when things start to deteriorate: liquidation cascades, correlated positioning, and concentration risk.
