Equity Perpetuals Part 1: The Infrastructure Shift
How crypto trading innovations are becoming mainstream
The Turning Point
By December 2025, equity perpetuals traded massive volumes in new venues that didn’t exist a year ago. Hyperliquid’s Nasdaq-100 perpetual contract launched in October and reached $58 billion in monthly volume by December, the fastest adoption ever for an equity derivative product.
As a market maker with deep roots across TradFi and crypto, we saw the inflection: 2025 marked the year when crypto’s institutional-grade infrastructure met traditional finance’s most valuable assets, and proved it works. The question is no longer if equity perpetuals will disrupt markets, but how fast institutions will adopt them.
The Core Mechanics
An equity perpetual is a derivative contract that tracks a stock’s price indefinitely, no expiration, no rolling costs. Imagine a Bitcoin perpetual, but for Apple. You post margin (usually stablecoin), go long or short with up to 50× leverage on some platforms, and the funding rate mechanism keeps the perp price anchored to the real stock price. When the perp trades above spot, longs pay shorts this difference; when below, shorts pay longs.
This structure, popularized by BitMEX for crypto in 2016, solves the friction of traditional equity derivatives:
No rolling: Futures contracts expire; perpetuals don’t. No quarterly scramble to exit and re-enter positions.
24/7 trading: Unlike stocks that close at a certain time, perps trade around the clock.
Leverage efficiency: Funding rates often approximate financing costs, making leverage cheaper than margin loans.
Transparent order books: You see the bids/asks and liquidity depth.
For retail traders in Asia or Europe, it allows access to the U.S. equity market through a permissionless market structure. For institutional traders, it’s a hedging tool that can be used continuously, enabling risk management outside traditional market hours. For regulators, it’s a paradigm shift they’re still learning to manage.
Why Now? Three Forces Converged
1. Crypto Infrastructure Matured Enough for Equities
By mid-2025, platforms like Hyperliquid demonstrated that decentralized order books could match TradFi latency while handling billions in daily notional volume. The technology isn’t the problem anymore.
Adding equities was a matter of sourcing clean price feeds and listing them. The only remaining question is: will regulators and institutions accept it?
2. Regulatory Pressure + Opportunity for Brokers
By April 2025, the CFTC issued an RFI on perpetual derivatives, signaling openness to the format. It was an invitation to submit data, use cases, and risk analyses.
In September, the SEC and CFTC held a joint roundtable and published a harmonization statement acknowledging that perps could be integrated into U.S. markets under the right structure.
CBOE and SGX announced perpetual futures launches. SGX went live on November 24, 2025, with BTC and ETH perpetuals in a CFTC-aligned structure. CBOE followed suit on December 15 with “continuous futures”: perpetual-style products designed to pass U.S. regulatory requirements. These were major institutional exchanges testing the product. That signal rippled through the industry.
3. Retail Demand from Underserved Markets
South Korean, Southeast Asian, and Indian retail traders have wanted 24/7 U.S. stock access. Traditional brokers offer limited hours and expensive fees. Tokenized stocks are a way to fill this gap, but the liquidity is still limited. Equity perps on crypto exchanges, with deep order books and low spreads, grew faster than anyone expected.
By mid-2025, TD Securities noted that South Korean traders comprised 40% of overnight U.S. trading volume via proxy instruments. Equity perps on crypto exchanges gave these users what they wanted: immediate fills, leverage, and no custodial barriers.
The Platforms: Three-Tier Landscape
The Market Structure
The equity perpetuals market has evolved into three distinct tiers: CEX platforms serving retail, DEX platforms serving crypto-native traders, and Institutional exchanges serving regulated markets. Each type has different volume profiles, leverage models, and regulatory pathways.
CEX Initiatives
BITGET
Product: 25+ equity perpetuals
Launch: September 2025
Leverage: 25×
Volume estimate: $50M+ daily
BITMEX
Product: 10+ equity perpetuals
Launch: December 2025
Leverage: 20×
Volume estimate: $1M+ daily
BINANCE
Binance entered the TradFi-perpetual race in early 2026 with the launch of TradFi Perpetual Contracts. The first listings were XAUUSDT and XAGUSDT, offering 24/7 synthetic exposure to gold and silver. They have signaled plans to expands its offering to include equities and indices, though no specific timelines have been announced.
DEX Initiatives
HYPERLIQUID
Product: 20+ equity perpetuals
Launch: October 2025
Leverage: up to 25×
Volume: $100M+ daily
OSTIUM LABS
Product: 30+ RWA perpetuals
Launch: Q1 2025
Leverage: up to 200×
Volume: $50M+ daily
Institutional Initiatives
CME GROUP – Spot-Quoted Futures
Product: 4 quasi-perpetual equity index futures
Key Distinction: Long-dated futures, not perpetuals
Launch: June 2025
Leverage: ~5-10×
Volume: $10M+ daily
SGX
Product: Crypto perpetuals
Launch: November, 2025
Leverage: ~5-10×
Volume: $25M+ daily
Key Takeaways
Institutional platforms are adopting equity derivatives: CME's 4 spot-quoted equity indices reflect institutional appetite for alternatives to traditional index futures.
On-chain demand for equities is clear and persistent: $400M+ daily volume across all platforms, launched and growing throughout 2025.
Fragmentation across DEXs, CEXs, and regulated venues reflects competing visions for equity perpetuals: CME, Hyperliquid, Bitget, and others are all building perpetual equity products through different infrastructure models.
What This Means Right Now
The infrastructure for 24/7 global equity trading is no longer theoretical. It’s live, handling tens of billions in volume, and attracting institutional participation. The question isn’t whether it works. The question is: Which market layers become critical when equities trade 24/7?
Equity perpetuals compress market structure in ways that are easy to underestimate. Trading, financing, and risk management converge into a single instrument, often within a single venue. This creates efficiency, but also concentrates risk in places traditional frameworks were not designed to monitor.
But before institutions can deploy capital at scale, they need to understand the risks and the opportunities. In the next part, we take a deeper look at the institutional dynamics and underlying risks.