Equities close and reopen, so weekend risk arrives as a gap. Everything that happened is priced in at once, and nobody was exposed to the path in between.
Crypto stays open. There is no gap, and there is also no pause — a position is live through the whole weekend, and so is every liquidation engine.
Open is not the same as liquid
Participation falls at weekends. Market makers run smaller, institutional flow largely stops, and books thin out. The market is continuously tradeable and materially shallower.
Which means the same order moves price further, for the reasons in thin liquidity and volatility. A move that would be absorbed on a Wednesday can travel on a Sunday, on flow that is not larger — only less opposed.
What this does to the dealer map
Gamma is unchanged — the book is the book — but its effect is amplified in both directions. Dealers long gamma dampen a market that is easier to dampen, so pinning near a large strike can be unusually tight. Dealers short gamma amplify a market that is easier to move, so a break can extend much further than the same structure would produce midweek.
So the honest statement is not that weekends are more or less volatile. It is that the existing structure is expressed more strongly, because there is less liquidity standing against it.
And the leverage does not sleep
The other half is that liquidation engines run continuously. A weekend move into a cluster of leveraged positions produces forced flow into a book that is thinner than usual, which is the precise combination that turns a move into a cascade.
That is the practical implication and it does not require a forecast: whatever position you carry into a weekend, carry it with the assumption that the market’s capacity to absorb it is smaller than the one you sized it in.