CME Group Shatters Records: Crypto & Rates Drive Historic 2025 Trading Volume
CME Group just posted its best year ever—and the numbers don't lie. Forget the old guard; the new engines of growth are digital assets and interest rate volatility.
The Crypto Catalyst
Institutional money flooded in. Bitcoin and Ethereum futures became more than niche products—they turned into core liquidity pools. The narrative flipped from speculative toy to legitimate hedge, pulling in asset managers who once scoffed at the space. Volatility wasn't a bug; it was a feature that kept the order books thick.
Rates: The Unstoppable Force
While crypto grabbed headlines, the relentless churn in interest rate markets provided the steady drumbeat. Every Fed whisper, every inflation print, every shift in macroeconomic sentiment translated directly into trading volume. Hedgers and speculators alike couldn't sit still.
The New Market Reality
The record proves a simple, powerful point: traditional finance and crypto aren't parallel universes anymore. They're converging on the same trading floors, driven by the same forces—uncertainty and the hunt for alpha. The so-called 'grown-up' market just had its biggest party yet, fueled in no small part by the asset class it spent years dismissing. Sometimes, the most profitable trade is swallowing your pride.
Record Annual Volume Reached
Interest rate futures and options were the single largest segment, with average daily volume of about 14 million contracts for the year. Equity index contracts added roughly 7.4 million on average each day.
Energy trading averaged NEAR 2.7 million contracts, and agricultural products came in around 1.9 million. Metals trading set records too, with roughly 988,000 contracts daily. According to company data and market coverage, these numbers combined to push the overall ADV to the 28.1 million mark.
CME Group 2025 Market Statistics Highest Annual ADV Ever: 28.1M contracts
Interest Rate: 14.2M*Equity Index: 7.4MEnergy: 2.7M*Agricultural: 1.9M*Metals: 988K*FX: 980KCrypto: 278K*
*All-Time Annual Record https://t.co/qBhSOHOMkA
— CME Group (@CMEGroup) January 5, 2026
Crypto Contracts Surge
Crypto futures and options saw a dramatic increase, with average daily volume of about 278,000 contracts, a jump of close to 140% from the previous year. Some trading days in November produced unusually large single-day tallies for crypto — nearly 795,000 contracts traded on one peak day — and total notional activity in the space reached roughly $12 billion during the year.
The steep rise in crypto derivatives helped lift activity outside the more traditional segments and increased the share of international and institutional flows.
Monthly data showed several high-water marks. April registered one of the year’s strongest months, with average daily volume near 35.9 million contracts, while November also posted exceptionally high monthly averages above 33 million.
Those spikes reflected bouts of market volatility and heavy hedging across asset classes, according to traders and analysts cited in coverage of the figures.
CME Group’s international average daily volume climbed as well, reaching around 8.4 million contracts for the year. That rise, combined with gains in energy, metals and crypto, made the advance broad-based rather than concentrated in a single sector. The result was a year in which multiple product lines set or matched prior volume records.
Trading firms and investors said that shifts in interest-rate views, renewed energy-market activity and the return of strong crypto flows were all factors behind the numbers. The exchange’s published market-statistics package provides the detailed breakdowns, and regulators and market watchers will be parsing the data as they consider liquidity and market structure questions.
Featured image from CME Group, chart from TradingView
