CME's outage triggered a market trading halt, did the on-chain exchange win again?

On the morning of November 28, Taiwan time, the world's largest derivatives trading exchange, CME Group, suspended trading and froze quotes in the forex, commodities, bonds, and futures markets due to a cooling equipment failure at the data center CyrusOne. This left Asian traders at a loss in a market already lacking liquidity after the Thanksgiving holiday, especially as rumors spread due to silver futures having just reached a historical high before the outage.

The world's largest derivatives trading exchange, CME, has experienced a major outage, with multiple markets completely suspended.

CME Group experienced technical issues on Friday morning, resulting in a suspension of quotes across its platforms including the forex platform EBS, WTI crude oil, US Treasury bonds, gold, crude oil, and S&P 500 futures markets.

According to the CME notification, the incident originated from an anomaly in the cooling system of the data center of the custody service provider CyrusOne, which caused a failure in the trading system. It has been four hours and repairs are still ongoing.

Forbes stated to Reuters that several brokers have urgently suspended trading on certain products, and even changed their pricing sources or quoted prices themselves: “We are now bearing many unnecessary risks.”

This incident reminded Christopher, the Asia-Pacific head of CMC Markets, of the technical issues that caused the CME agricultural products electronic board to halt in 2014, as well as the brief interruptions of the London Stock Exchange and the Swiss Exchange in 2024.

He admitted that in his 20 years in the industry, he had never seen such a large-scale exchange disconnection: “To be honest, this is really a hassle.”

Asian early trading fluctuates: the market loses pricing benchmarks.

The suspension occurred after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, during the Asian early session when liquidity was already low, and the impact was particularly evident. Traders could not obtain real-time prices and could only rely on economic data from other regions or local trading volume to make judgments.

Asian stocks opened with mixed trends: the Nikkei Average Index ( Nikkei 225) fluctuated, the Korean Composite Stock Price Index ( Kospi) fell by 1.41%, and the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index continued to weaken. The market is generally concerned that after the system recovery, there may be significant volatility.

Hyperliquid again wins? The importance of decentralized infrastructure emerges.

This matter once again highlights the drawbacks of the global financial market's high dependence on a single infrastructure, raising concerns about whether CME can operate smoothly when launching 24/7 derivatives trading.

At the same time, the crypto community cannot help but emphasize the importance of decentralized infrastructure. Currently, trading pairs such as XYZ 100, which symbolizes the Nasdaq 100 index, are operating normally on the on-chain perpetual contracts exchange Hyperliquid.

( Note: XYZ 100 will operate according to the natural supply and demand of the market when real quotes are not obtained )

Silver prices hit new highs as CME experiences outages: Conspiracy theories in the precious metals market heat up again.

Before the incident occurred, silver futures had just broken through the new high of 54 USD per ounce, leading many retail investors and analysts on X to question whether it was too coincidental, pointing directly to market manipulation and believing that the suspension aimed to suppress certain commodities from breaking through specific price levels.

Source: Macro Liquidity by Sunil Reddy

However, CME emphasized that the outage was purely a technical incident and had no correlation with market fluctuations.

The market is waiting to restart, and accumulated orders may trigger greater volatility.

Asian traders pointed out that the CME suspension combined with the U.S. stock market's Thanksgiving holiday will lead to a quieter trading day, with global trading volume further contracting.

Experts anticipate that once the CME resumes operations, the previously accumulated orders and hedging demands may surge simultaneously, causing significant volatility in the futures and forex markets at the moment of restart.

This article discusses whether the CME outage has caused a market trading halt, and if on-chain exchanges have won again. Originally appeared in Chain News ABMedia.