What’s a CME gap and why does it get filled?

Bitcoin trades 24/7, yet every Monday morning, a peculiarity appears in the only US venue where professional money managers can put large, regulated futures positions to work: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

Because CME’s Bitcoin futures stop matching orders for roughly forty-seven hours every weekend, the first print on Sunday at 17:00 CT often sits well above or below the last trade on Friday at 16:00 CT.

This “price vacuum” is the CME gap. It might look trivial on a chart, but it encodes information about who controlled liquidity while CME was dark, how aggressively derivatives desks hedged into the break, and where the next round of basis arbitrage will force the market.

In 2024 and through April 2025, the gap phenomenon endured despite spot-ETF inflows, record open interest, and the halving-year volatility spike, confirming that the weekend wall in traditional finance still shapes Bitcoin’s micro-structure in ways that 24/7 spot venues cannot fully absorb.

CryptoSlate dives deep into how and why the gap emerges and why it almost always disappears to understand liquidity, arbitrage, and trader psychology.