A lot of these investors shorted Bitcoin in the past and they lost millions.
That would demonstrate how dysfunctional these so-called "Bitcoin futures markets" are.
The whole point of futures markets is to buy contracts to deliver something at a future price, not today's price. Because the CME and CBOE don't sell contracts to deliver BTC, but the USD equivalent, the BTC price cannot affect the trading on these markets, or vice versa (except perhaps psychologically).
This strongly suggests that there is backroom dealing whereby BTC
is delivered to some unnofficial (and undocumented) tier of these futures markets. Who would trade such contracts otherwise? What would be the point of putting up money for weeks and weeks that does nothing to influence the real BTC markets? That would be little different to putting money on a horse (and I think we all know these days that people with alot of money to bet on sporting events have a penchant for trying to meddle with the outcome so that they win their bet).
This whole concept of "trading BTC without touching the dirty BTC markets" is a complete joke, there's no way any real investor would really do something so crude, you may as well get yourself down to the roulette wheel and put everything on black, lol. And after all, these are Chicago-based markets