Nevertheless, the volume indicates the interest of bitcoin market and big whales can slightly manipulate the market by buying and selling bitcoin according to the contract's deadline which occasionally intrigues the market to panic sell. Traders may just buy 100 or 200 contracts but they also can buy 1000-2000 bitcoin at the current rate, waiting for the price increase and dump it by the end of the day.
That's assuming the deadline actually matters, and I'm not really convinced of that. We definitely need more history to prove that.
The main point is that when wealthy players have enough resources to manipulate the spot market, why would they use an extremely regulated platform as CBOE to do that? BitMex has way more liquidity, is far less restrictive, let's you settle shorts or longs based on cash value but with Bitcoin, and you can withdraw your funds in Bitcoin at anytime without anyone asking you all sorts of questions. For that reason I strongly believe that if there is one platform highly correlated with manipulation, then it's BitMex.
BitMex's current volume is $1.8 billion for the last 24 hours, but they have had days with $4-5 billion in 24h volumes.
Current situation is that traders here are afraid of CBOE & CME's manipulation, but at the same time traders using CBOE & CME are afraid of Bitcoin's manipulation.