The $25 million Bitcoin glitch hiding inside Wall Street’s clearinghouses

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.

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