Everything is becoming a perp

When SpaceX went public on June 12, the stock traded where you’d expect: over 500 million shares and roughly $80 billion in notional across Nasdaq and the usual venues. But in parallel, a 24/7 leveraged perpetual on SpaceX became the single biggest market Hyperliquid had ever run, trading well above the $135 IPO price as its own discovery venue, and handing ordinary traders leveraged exposure to a company most of them could never get an allocation in.

It was under 2% of Nasdaq’s volume. But it’s a market that didn’t exist a cycle ago. That’s the tell.

There’s a word I keep coming back to for what’s happening to markets right now: perpification. The perpetual, the 24/7, leveraged contract that crypto invented and then perfected, is breaking out of the asset class that built it. It’s no longer just a way to trade crypto. It’s becoming the way to trade everything.

Matthew Fisher is the CEO of Katana Network.

Look at where perps have already spread. Equities, including foreign names that are hard to access, the most recent example being SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory-chip maker and a company that sits at the center of the AI boom as a key supplier to giants like Nvidia. Commodities: gold, silver, and oil perps were the fastest-growing derivatives segment of early 2026. The power of 24/7 price discovery had never been clearer than on Saturday, February 28, 2026, the first day of “Operation Epic Fury,” when the price of oil spiked over the weekend during the first U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, while the traditional markets sat closed. Pre-IPO names, too: a perp let people trade SpaceX before its June IPO, and on listing day SpaceX was the single biggest market on Hyperliquid. And tokenized real-world assets are next in line.

This is no longer confined to crypto-native venues. In the U.S., Kalshi has gone live with the first CFTC-regulated crypto perpetual futures and Coinbase has launched perpetual-style equity-index futures, while Robinhood has rolled out perpetual futures across Europe, putting perpetual-style products in front of mainstream users. The incumbents are moving too: in June, the CME announced 24/7 trading and a new West Texas Intermediate (WFI) contract one-tenth the size of its Micro future, cash-settled and aimed squarely at smaller trades.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.