Two Wall Street trading desks can hold economically similar exposure to Bitcoin and still pay materially different amounts to keep that exposure open. That’s not because one desk made a better market call, but because the regulated products carrying the positions are inside collateral systems that don’t always recognize them as parts of the same hedge.
One desk can reconstruct a forward Bitcoin position from matching calls and puts on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), while another can obtain comparable price exposure through a cash-settled CME Bitcoin futures contract with a similar maturity.
While the economic risk is closely related, the financing cost isn’t.
A May 2026 study by Purdue University professor Mindy Mallory compared 386 matched observations and found that the annualized carry embedded in CME Bitcoin futures exceeded the fee-adjusted carry reconstructed from IBIT options by an average of 2.581 percentage points, with a median difference of 2.521 points.
Applied purely as an illustration, a 2.581-point annualized difference on a $1 billion position would correspond to approximately $25.81 million over a full year, although the paper doesn’t describe the wedge as a fixed fee and found that it varied substantially across dates, occasionally reversing direction entirely.
The result exposes one of the less visible consequences of Bitcoin’s arrival on Wall Street: investors gained several regulated ways to reach the same asset, but those products were placed into separate securities, options and futures systems that still don’t behave like one integrated market.
Two routes to similar Bitcoin exposure
The institutional Bitcoin market now includes spot exchange-traded products, listed options on those products, standard and micro CME futures, options on futures and shorter-dated Bitcoin Friday contracts, each providing a different combination of custody, leverage, liquidity, settlement and collateral treatment.
For the study, the relevant comparison was between the forward price implied by IBIT options and the forward price visible in a matched CME futures contract.
A futures contract already states the price at which Bitcoin exposure will settle at a later date, making its implied carry relatively straightforward to observe.
The corresponding forward price inside IBIT’s options market must be reconstructed through put-call parity, which uses the prices of a call and put sharing the same strike and expiration to calculate the forward value implied by the options market.
BlackRock’s official IBIT disclosures, including the amount of Bitcoin represented by each share and the fund’s 0.25% annual sponsor fee, then allow that ETF-implied forward to be converted into Bitcoin terms and compared with CME futures.
The study aligned both routes with the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate New York Variant, a once-daily Bitcoin benchmark synchronized with the 4 p.m. New York market close.
| Feature | IBIT options route | CME futures route |
|---|---|---|
| Exposure | A forward price is reconstructed from matched calls and puts on IBIT shares. | A Bitcoin futures contract provides direct forward exposure through a stated contract price. |
| Underlying reference | IBIT shares backed by Bitcoin held by the trust. | Cash-settled Bitcoin futures linked to CME reference-rate methodology. |
| Clearing system | Listed options generally clear through the Options Clearing Corporation. | Futures clear through CME Clearing. |
| How carry appears | Carry must be inferred through put-call parity and adjusted for Bitcoin per share and the fund fee. | Carry appears in the futures premium or discount relative to the aligned Bitcoin benchmark. |
| Principal friction | ETF financing, option liquidity, and securities-account margin treatment. | Separate futures margin, daily settlement, and collateral requirements. |
| Average result in the study | Lower fee-adjusted implied carry on average. | Carry averaged 2.581 annual percentage points above the IBIT-options route. |
Data note: The 2.581-point figure is a historical sample average reported by the paper, not a permanent price difference or guaranteed trading return.
The 2.58-point average is large enough to be economically meaningful, but it’s not representative of every individual trading day.
The study reported a standard deviation of 4.716 percentage points, a fifth-percentile reading of negative 4.767 points and a ninety-fifth-percentile reading of 10.418 points, showing that the relative cost changed widely and that CME wasn’t always the more expensive route.
The difference also increased with maturity in the selected sample.
Positions in the 14-to-30-day window produced an average wedge of 2.222 points, while those in the 31-to-60-day window averaged 2.939 points, with 193 observations in each group.
The paper excluded the 61-to-90-day results because longer-dated IBIT options remained too thin to produce sufficiently stable comparisons.
Those distinctions are important to note because the headline result should not be interpreted as an automatic 2.58% surcharge attached to every CME futures position, but as evidence that economically related Bitcoin exposures can remain priced differently when capital, margin and liquidity cannot move frictionlessly between their respective systems.
Why doesn’t arbitrage erase the difference?
In a fully integrated market, a sufficiently large and persistent pricing difference would attract arbitrage capital until buying the cheaper exposure and selling the more expensive one pushed the two prices back together.
The Bitcoin market doesn’t always allow that process to take place because IBIT shares and listed options occupy securities-market infrastructure, while CME futures use a separate futures clearinghouse, margin cycle and collateral framework.
The Options Clearing Corporation and CME operate a cross-margin program that recognizes eligible offsetting positions held at different clearinghouses, reducing margin requirements and settlement demands.
However, OCC states that participation is generally limited to clearing members, their affiliates and certain market professionals, while the precise benefit depends on the products, account structure, broker and legal classification involved.
An IBIT options position in one account therefore won’t automatically offset a CME futures position in another account just because the two trades appear hedged in economic terms.
A company can have little net Bitcoin price exposure across the combined position and still be required to support two separate margin pools, reducing the amount of capital available for other positions and creating a financing cost that can become embedded in quoted prices.
The paper’s findings are consistent with that segmentation, although they shouldn’t be read as proving that margin treatment is the only possible cause of every daily difference.
Who ultimately bears the hidden cost?
Relative-value funds feel the friction most directly because their strategies frequently pair one Bitcoin product against another, leaving them economically hedged while requiring collateral in more than one location.
A familiar example is the basis trade, in which an institution holds spot or ETF exposure while selling futures, seeking to capture the difference between the two prices rather than making an unhedged prediction about Bitcoin’s direction.
CryptoSlate previously examined how those strategies helped create a two-tier institutional Bitcoin market in which ETF demand, futures hedging, and yield-focused positioning interact.
Market makers can transfer the cost less visibly through wider bid-ask spreads, option premiums and implied volatility, meaning the expense may eventually reach other investors without appearing as a separately itemized fee.
That’s why the cheapest regulated Bitcoin product can’t be identified by comparing expense ratios alone, because its full cost also depends on financing, liquidity, custody, margin offsets, collateral eligibility, and the operational permissions attached to the account.
Against those larger variables, IBIT’s stated 0.25% sponsor fee can become one of the smaller components of the total holding cost.
That also complicates interpretations of spot Bitcoin ETF inflows and outflows, because not every share entering or leaving an ETF represents a simple investor decision to become bullish or bearish on Bitcoin.
ETF shares can support basis positions, options hedges, covered-call programs, relative-value trades, and dealer inventory, creating activity that may look directional when seen only through the daily flow total.
CryptoSlate documented that shift when Bitcoin options open interest overtook futures, reflecting growing use of structured exposure, hedging, and volatility strategies rather than straightforward leveraged bets.
IBIT’s options market has also become an important destination for covered-call and income-focused positioning. Periods of severe volatility have produced record activity there as institutions reshaped risk through a regulated US-listed wrapper.
That means a large ETF inflow can coexist with a short futures hedge, while a large outflow can reflect the closing of a spread or options-related inventory rather than the abandonment of a long-term Bitcoin allocation.
CME solved the weekend trading gap, but not the collateral gap
CME expanded its cryptocurrency futures and options market to 24-hour, seven-day trading on May 29, allowing regulated futures traders to react to Bitcoin moves during weekends rather than waiting for the traditional Sunday reopening.
The change reduced one important mismatch between a continuously traded cryptocurrency and the limited hours of conventional derivatives markets, a transition CryptoSlate examined in its coverage of how CME’s weekend expansion changed Bitcoin’s institutional trading cycle.
It didn’t make every component of the market continuous or fully integrated.
US equity and listed-options markets remain closed through the weekend. Weekend and holiday transactions on CME receive the following business day’s trade date and pass through clearing, settlement, and regulatory reporting on that business day.
A weekend shock can therefore be traded immediately through CME futures, while IBIT shares and listed options needed for the other side of a cross-market position remain unavailable until the equity market reopens.
When volatility rises, margin requirements and liquidity demands can rise with it, making separate collateral pools most burdensome right when arbitrage capital is needed to reconnect prices across the different wrappers.
Wall Street solved the first major problem presented by institutional Bitcoin adoption by creating several regulated products through which investors could obtain exposure without directly holding coins or using offshore exchanges.
It still hasn’t solved the second problem, which is making those products operate as parts of one connected market whose collateral system recognizes economically offsetting risk wherever it appears.
The 2.58-point average reported by the Purdue study is therefore more than just a comparison between two financing rates, because it measures the potential cost of dividing one underlying asset among legal and operational compartments that remain only partially connected.
Investors may see IBIT options, CME futures and spot Bitcoin ETFs as different doors into the same market, but the systems behind those doors still apply different rules to funding, settlement and collateral, creating a cost that no ETF expense ratio displays.