Everyone has the perps convergence backwards

Perpetual futures, or "perps," represent the largest market crypto has built, characterized by their continuous nature without expiry or settlement dates and a funding rate mechanism to keep prices anchored to spot markets. Traditionally treated as a crypto-native product, the perp market has now expanded significantly into traditional assets like gold, currencies, equities, and stock indices. According to CoinDesk Research, volumes of real-world-asset perps surged to a record $211 billion in May 2026, a sixteen-fold increase from $12 billion in late 2025, with equity perps alone rising 121% month over month to $54 billion. Analysts project that equity perps could eventually surpass crypto perps in trading volume.

This expansion demonstrates a reversal of the common narrative that crypto is merely adopting traditional finance disciplines. Instead, traditional financial assets are migrating onto the perpetual futures market structure that crypto invented. Perpetual markets offer distinct advantages, such as continuous, global accessibility and settlements on infrastructure that operates continuously, unlike traditional venues that close on weekends and have settlement windows. This makes perps materially different and arguably more useful, with no need for short-borrowing desks, contract rollovers, or waiting for settlement.

While concerns remain about perps being leveraged speculative instruments and about the risks associated with continuous leverage and less enforced price discovery compared to traditional futures settlement, the author stresses these issues call for careful structural development rather than an assumption that the perp market won't expand. The demand for such instruments is clear, drawing traders to venues offering universal access to global assets across stocks, crypto, and forex.

Notably, crypto's integration of real economic rights into tokens has advanced, with projects delisted if unsupported and some strong teams opting for IPOs. Even the IPO process itself has been simulated in crypto markets through synthetic pre-IPO perps, as seen with SpaceX shares trading on Hyperliquid prior to their official listing in June 2026, generating volumes up to $1.3 billion on debut day. Meanwhile, centralized exchanges increasingly feature multi-asset books where equities, crypto, and FX trade side by side, with a single platform handling over half of real-world-asset perp volume in May 2026.

The key takeaway the source emphasizes is that crypto is not simply converging toward Wall Street's traditional structures; rather, portions of Wall Street may increasingly trade on infrastructure that crypto created, potentially reshaping up to 10% of global capital markets—measured in trillions of dollars—with perpetual futures being the primary vehicle for this change.