CME’s bitcoin futures, considered a proxy for institutional activity, gapped lower Monday in a sign of bearish sentiment after President Donald Trump ruled out a trade deal with China.

The futures contract due to expire on the last Friday of April began trading at $79,590, down 5.6% from Friday’s close of $84,250 and quickly descended to $76,800, CoinDesk data show.

The losses came as Dow futures fell 900 points, Chinese stocks crashed, and the Japanese equity market slipped into lower circuit breakers as JPMorgan, S&P Global, and Goldman Sachs increased the probability of the U.S. falling into recession this year.

On Sunday, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he wanted to solve the trade deficit with China “and unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.”

Trump added that world leaders are dying to make a deal. Last week, the President announced sweeping tariffs on 180 nations, boosting the total levy on China to 54%. Since then, financial markets have wilted, which the President thinks is the necessary medicine to solve the problem.

“I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump said.

Open interest slides on CME

Open interest in the CME futures peaked in December at 281.57 BTC and has since declined to 140.5K, the lowest since August 2024, according to data source Coinglass.

It’s a sign of money leaving the digital assets space, perhaps in anticipation of a deeper price swoon.

Meanwhile, global futures and perpetual futures open interest, excluding CME, has increased from roughly 400K BTC to 520 BTC in the past four weeks.

An increase in open interest alongside a price drop is said to confirm the bearish trend, indicating that traders are building short positions in a falling market.

On Friday, cryptocurrency exchange Bybit was allegedly hacked by North Korea’s Lazarus group, which drained nearly $1.4 billion in ether (ETH) from the exchange.

Following the hack, Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder and claiming to be a major ether (ETH) holder, wrote a post on X to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on whether he will “advocate to roll back the chain to help @Bybit_Official.” Meanwhile, in an X spaces session, Bybit’s CEO Ben Zhou revealed that his team had also reached out to the Ethereum Foundation to see if it was something the network would consider, noting that such a decision should be based on what the network’s community wants.

Hayes’s post immediately provoked a fierce reaction from the Ethereum community, which was firm in its belief that it wouldn’t happen. Some even questioned whether the BitMEX founder was joking. CoinDesk reached out to Hayes over X to clarify his comments.

Ethereum members, like the core developer teams, are vastly against “rolling back” the network because it would override core elements of decentralization. If Buterin decided on his own that it would happen, then that would be seen as the end of Ethereum’s ethos, which heavily involves various developer teams and other community members when it comes to the health and state of the blockchain.

“Rolling back the chain would give ETH no purpose. What’s the point if you can just change rules,” said user @the_weso in a post on X.

Some outside the Ethereum community pointed to the 2016 DAO hack as an example when $60 million in ETH was stolen. The network went forward with a hard fork, splitting the old network into two, and the new chain continued on as Ethereum.

That hard fork was not a “rollback,” though; it was known as an “irregular state transition.” Ethereum technically can’t “roll back” the network because it relies on an account model, where accounts hold users’ ETH.

At the time of the hack, developers upgraded their nodes to a new client or software. Those who didn’t upgrade their nodes were still on the old chain, which became known as Ethereum Classic.

When the nodes upgraded to the new software, the stolen ETH could move from one Ethereum account address to the next.

“The ‘irregular state change’ that they implemented at the time of the DAO hard fork was this: they airlifted all the ETH in the DAO smart contracts out to a refund contract that would send you 1 ETH for every 100 DAO tokens you sent in,” wrote Laura Shin of Unchained in a post on X.

Read more: Arthur Hayes Floats the Idea of Rolling Back Ethereum Network to Negate $1.4B Bybit Hack, Drawing Community Ire