How perpetual futures are rewriting global trading
Short summary
Perpetual futures—contracts with no expiry—have exploded from $86 trillion on centralized exchanges in 2025 to $6.7 trillion on decentralized venues, carving out nearly 8% of CEX volume. Builders are racing to deploy new perp markets, expand real-world-asset trading and refine front-ends, liquidity provision and data infrastructure.
- Onchain perp volume grew 346% to $6.7 trillion, pushing DEX share of CEX volume from 2.5% to 7.8% in a year.
- Hyperliquid's permissionless HIP-3 markets let anyone launch a perp and keep half the fees, driving RWA perps (Nvidia GPUs, silver, oil, SpaceX equity) to 44% of its volume.
- DEX weekend crude oil perps now provide price discovery when traditional markets are closed.
- Perps' simplicity (post margin once, no strikes/expiries, liquidation as sole downside) makes them more capital-efficient than the booming 0DTE options market (2.3M SPX contracts/day, 59% of SPX volume) for short-term directional bets.
Full summary
Perpetual futures, or “perps,” are futures contracts with no expiry date. They first gained traction in crypto in 2016 via BitMEX’s XBTUSD swap and have since ballooned into a multi-trillion-dollar market. Last year, centralized exchanges cleared $86.2 trillion in perp volume (up 47% year-over-year), while onchain venues jumped 346% to $6.7 trillion, pushing DEX share from 2.5% to 7.8% of CEX activity. Builders like Hyperliquid, Avantis, Lighter, Ostium and Variational have raced to close gaps in liquidity and features, launching permissionless markets and RWA (real-world asset) perps that cover equities, commodities and private-company valuations.
Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 mechanism lets anyone spin up a perp market and keep half the fees by managing oracles and risk parameters. That permissionless model helped RWA perps—contracts on assets like Nvidia H100 GPUs, silver, crude oil and SpaceX equity—soar to 44% of Hyperliquid’s volume. Other DEXs report similar trends: on Ostium, RWA pairs consistently top trading volumes. Weekend crude oil perps on DEXs now offer price discovery when traditional markets are closed.
The broader appeal comes down to simplicity and accessibility. Traders don’t pick strike prices or roll expiries; they post margin once and hold a position indefinitely. Liquidation is the only downside, unlike options where theta decay and volatility shifts can erode gains. Compared with the booming 0DTE options market—which saw 2.3 million SPX contracts traded daily in 2025 (59% of all SPX volume)—perps deliver 24/7 trading with lower capital outlay. For directional bets lasting hours or days, that efficiency is hard to beat.
All this has sparked a wave of new interfaces, liquidity-provision tools and integrated wallets. Traditional fintech firms and startups alike are embedding perp trading into their products. As permissionless perp markets expand asset coverage and refine user experience, they’re moving from a niche crypto primitive toward a core instrument for leveraged exposure across digital and real-world assets.