Everything is becoming a perp

The perpetual — the 24/7, leveraged contract that crypto invented and then perfected — is no longer just a way to trade crypto, says Katana Network’s Matthew Fisher. It’s becoming the way to trade everything.

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.

Then the regulator stepped in. On June 22, the CFTC opened a request for comment on extending perpetual contracts to physically-delivered crude oil; 67 questions on reference prices, liquidity, position limits, and customer protection. And when the CME tried to self-certify its 24/7 oil contract in July, the CFTC stayed it, blocking the fast track and forcing a full review first.

This story – the market sprinting toward round-the-clock leveraged access to everything, and the rule-writers trying to decide how fast is safe – will keep repeating as the U.S. works to onshore derivatives flow and exchanges push for a level playing field with their offshore counterparts. When the biggest U.S. derivatives exchange is shrinking oil contracts for 24/7 retail access, and the U.S. derivatives regulator is drafting the rules for perpetual oil, you can stop debating whether the model won. It won.

So the interesting conversation isn’t “are perps spreading.” It’s three sharper questions: which asset classes get perpetuals next, where the leverage actually concentrates, and what breaks along the way.

On what’s next, follow the friction. Perps are most valuable precisely where the traditional market is most annoying, where it closes at night, gates you by geography, demands accreditation, or settles at a crawl. That’s why commodities, pre-IPO equities, and hard-to-reach foreign stocks got perpetuals first: enormous latent demand, hopelessly constrained access. The same logic points straight at private credit, carbon, freight, and the long tail of real-world assets coming onchain. Anything with a reference price and a frustrated audience is a candidate. The underlying almost doesn’t matter; the demand to trade it freely does.

On where the leverage concentrates, this is the part I’d want a mainstream reader to actually sit with, because it’s where the risk lives. A perp compresses two decisions into one instrument: what to own, and how much leverage to take. For a disciplined trader that’s a feature; they size deliberately and know perp risk is asymmetric and moves fast. The danger isn’t the product. The danger is what happens when a product built for professionals meets a wave of newcomers who see the upside of a small stake becoming a large one and never quite see where the floor gives way. Perpification is going to hand 24/7, high-leverage access to millions of people whose first experience of a “market” is a leveraged bet on an asset they’ve never traded. Some of them will get very good at it. A lot of them are going to learn about liquidation the hard way, at 3am, on a market that never closes.

That’s not an argument against perpification. It’s inevitable, and on balance it’s good, more people getting real, unrestricted access to more assets is what open markets are supposed to deliver. It’s an argument about how you build it. The venues that matter over the next few years won’t be the ones that simply crank leverage to the maximum to attract the degens. They’ll be the ones that treat leverage limits, liquidation design, and user education as core product, not compliance theater, the ones that make perpification survivable for the person who just showed up.

And there’s a deeper structural point that gets missed when people frame perps as just “leverage for retail.” The more powerful shift is who gets to create a market at all. In the old world, listing a new contract was a privilege, an exchange decided what was tradeable and when. Perpification, done properly, makes market creation permissionless: if there’s a reference price and demand, a market can exist without asking anyone. That’s the shift that matters most, and it’s the one that turns “perps on everything” from a slogan into infrastructure. The endgame isn’t a bigger menu chosen by a handful of venues. It’s a world where the menu writes itself.

Put those together and perpification stops looking like a crypto trend and starts looking like a change in the default settings of finance. The default used to be: markets are open sometimes, for some assets, to some people, chosen by someone. The new default is: any asset, any hour, anywhere, permissionless, with leverage if you want it. The CFTC eyeing oil perps is just the most establishment-friendly signpost on a road the market has already chosen.

The winners won’t be whoever launches the most perps the fastest. They’ll be whoever builds them responsibly, real depth, honest leverage, genuine user protection, while the model finishes eating the rest of finance. Because it’s going to. The only open question left is who builds it well.

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.

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