Crypto is rewriting how Wall Street traders spend their weekends

By Friday afternoon, the mood on commodity trading desks changes.

For the first four days of the week, traders have been trying to profit from their bets. By lunch on Friday, however, they're thinking about how much risk they can tolerate until markets reopen on Sunday evening.

Anything could happen while markets are closed: news of a new war, an election result, an unexpected OPEC announcement or, as seen recently, a market-moving presidential post. Forty-eight hours can be a long time when traders are holding a position tied to a few of the world's most actively traded markets, and there's nothing they can do until trading resumes.

"From about lunchtime, the desk basically stops thinking about making money and starts thinking about what they can live with for roughly forty-eight hours until the Sunday evening reopen," said Mustafa Al Niama, former Goldman Sachs head of digital assets of the Americas and now head of capital markets at Mysten Labs.

Every commodities options trader knows this ritual. By the end of the week, the question isn't where the commodity is going — it's whether they are comfortable living with their position if something happens while markets are closed, as they can't adjust or rebalance their bets on the weekend.

"Risk, geopolitical or not, does not know what day of the week it is," said Terry Duffy, chairman and CEO of CME Group.

Markets, however, still largely do. And for decades, planning ahead for potential weekend and after-hours catastrophes has just been part of the job for traders.

But earlier this year, something unusual happened in the oil options market, which upended this long-standing routine.

As tensions escalated between Iran and Israel and traders rushed to speculate on prices, oil-linked futures saw a sudden spike in volume over the weekend in March. The catch was that it happened when commodity markets were closed, but the traders didn't need to wait for the traditional market to reopen before reacting. Instead, they traded elsewhere.

Traders flocked to crypto exchanges over the weekend to trade derivatives contracts called "perpetual futures," which run around the clock.

The total value of all active contracts on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid hit a record $1.2 billion on March 8, a Sunday when traditional commodity markets were closed.

While weekend volume is still smaller than on weekdays, at least by Wall Street's standards, it is no longer just a blip. It highlighted something that barely existed a few years ago: a 24/7 venue for oil derivatives trading, while traditional finance is stuck offline.