A weekly read of the CFTC Commitments of Traders release for CME bitcoin, ether and solana futures. Every entry since January, on one dataset and one method, with every figure derived from the primary source rather than quoted.
Every Friday at 15:30 Eastern the Commodity Futures Trading Commission publishes a breakdown of who holds the open interest in the largest regulated futures markets in the United States. For CME bitcoin, ether, micro bitcoin, micro ether and micro solana futures it is the only public accounting of how much exposure regulated institutions actually carry. This column reads it.
35
Entries in the column, January 2026 to date
437
Weekly CFTC reports in the bitcoin series, back to 2018
5
CME digital asset contracts covered
6
Institutions holding a reportable long in bitcoin futures
Source: CFTC Commitments of Traders, Traders in Financial Futures, futures only. Prices are Coinbase daily closes. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Asset managers’ net position in CME bitcoin futures
The series this column reads. Net long minus short, in contracts, weekly. One contract is five bitcoin.
Source: CFTC Commitments of Traders, Traders in Financial Futures, futures only. Prices are Coinbase daily closes. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
What the data is
The report is the Traders in Financial Futures section of the Commitments of Traders release. It sorts every reportable participant into five categories, of which one, Asset Manager or Institutional, covers pensions, endowments, insurers, mutual funds and the managers acting on their behalf. Positions are those held at the close on a Tuesday and are published the following Friday, so every reading is three days old when it arrives.
It is a floor rather than a total. CME is one venue, and spot exchange traded products, offshore perpetual futures and over the counter forwards all sit outside it. What it measures is the part of institutional exposure that has to be declared to a United States regulator, which is the part that can be checked.
What the series has found
Where the data stands
Asset managers’ net position in CME bitcoin futures is +2,732 contracts, −86.2% from its peak of +19,802 in 23 July 2024.
In CME ether futures the same category is net −3,076 contracts, having set the most negative reading in the history of that series during August.
Only 6 institutions hold a reportable long in CME bitcoin futures, out of 125 reporting traders in the contract.
Open interest has fallen in 2026 in four of the five contracts. The exception is micro bitcoin, the contract sized for retail accounts.
Figures throughout the series are derived rather than quoted. The pipeline pulls the CFTC release and Coinbase daily closes, computes each figure, and interpolates it into the copy, so any number in any piece can be reproduced by running it again. Each piece uses only the reports the CFTC had published on that piece’s own date. Contract multipliers are the CME published specifications: five bitcoin, fifty ether, one tenth of a bitcoin or ether for the micro contracts, and twenty-five SOL.