The "True and False Prosperity" of Perpetual Contracts: Have You Seen Through It?

Author: Prathik Desai

Compiled and organized by: BitpushNews

Just when you think finance is becoming dull, it always surprises you. Recently, it seems everyone is reconstructing the financial system in ways few anticipated, including those from the entertainment and media industries.

Take Jimmy Donaldson, also known as “MrBeast” on YouTube, for example. He not only has a snack empire but recently acquired a banking app aimed at promoting financial literacy and money management among teenagers and young adults. Why? Perhaps nothing is more direct than monetizing a user base of 466 million subscribers through financial products.

This summer, the CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, will launch single-stock futures, allowing users to trade futures on over 50 top U.S. stocks, including Alphabet, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Meta.

These reconstructions show us how people’s participation in finance is changing. Over the past few years, nothing illustrates this better than the explosion of perpetual markets.

Perpetual futures, or “Perps,” are a type of financial derivative contract that allows market participants to speculate on asset prices without an expiration date. Perps also enable quick and inexpensive expression of market views. They are more attractive than traditional markets because they offer instant access and leverage. Unlike traditional markets, they do not require broker onboarding, jurisdictional paperwork, or adherence to “normal” trading hours.

Moreover, on-chain perpetual markets allow any asset—whether traditional or crypto—to be traded permissionlessly with high leverage. This makes speculation exciting, especially when humans can’t resist betting on volatile assets outside traditional trading hours. This enables real-time pricing of risk.

Think about what happened two weeks ago. When both traditional and crypto markets crashed simultaneously, traders flocked to Hyperliquid, fueling a frenzy in perpetual gold and silver trading. On January 31, Hyperliquid alone accounted for 2% of global daily silver trading volume in its first month of operation on its silver perpetual contract market.

This explains why dashboards of perpetual contract trading volumes are increasingly dominating crypto communities and forums. Trading volume is an absolute number. It looks large, refreshes every few minutes, and is great for leaderboards. But it misses a key nuance: trading volume may reflect a meaningless movement. A market with high volume might have deep liquidity, but it could also be driven by incentives encouraging high-frequency activity. This activity is often recursive and of little significance.

This week, I delved into other metrics of perpetual markets. When used alongside trading volume, these metrics add more dimensions and tell a story quite different from just volume.

Let’s get started.

A Few Data Points

Perpetual markets’ user-friendly interfaces make them a low-barrier, default way to express views across various markets and global assets. The broad choice of high-leverage derivatives trading on a single platform for both traditional and crypto assets has led to perpetual contracts surpassing spot trading volume on decentralized exchanges. From 44% in February 2025, the share of perpetual trading volume has soared to about 75% today (relative to spot trading volume).

This growth has been especially notable in recent months:

• As of July 31, 2025, the total cumulative perpetual trading volume across all platforms reached $6.91 trillion.
• In just the past six months, this volume doubled to $14 trillion.

All this growth occurred against the backdrop of the total cryptocurrency market cap shrinking by nearly 40% from August 1, 2025, to February 9, 2026. This activity indicates traders are increasingly favoring derivatives trading, hedging, and short-term positioning, especially when spot markets become volatile and bearish.

But there’s a trap. In such a massive activity landscape, it’s easy to misinterpret trading volume metrics. Especially because perpetual trading isn’t just buying assets and holding long-term; it also involves repeatedly adjusting bets with leverage over shorter timeframes.

Therefore, when market turnover accelerates, an inevitable question arises in my mind: does record-breaking trading volume reflect more capital inflow, or the same capital cycling faster?

This is where observing open interest (OI) becomes meaningful. If trading volume reflects capital flow, then OI measures the unclosed risk exposure. In perpetual exchanges, OI refers to the total dollar value of active, unsettled long and short contracts held by traders.

If perpetual trading gains acceptance among mainstream markets, we want to see not only larger capital flows but also proportionally growing open interest.

• In February last year, OI averaged around $4 billion;
• Now, that figure has tripled to about $13 billion. In fact, the entire month of January saw an average of around $18 billion, then dropped about 30% in the first week of February.

While perpetual trading volume doubled over the past five months, OI grew by roughly 50% (from $13 billion to about $18 billion, then back down to $13 billion). To better understand this, I examined the trend of capital efficiency—defined as OI as a percentage of daily trading volume—over the past year.

The OI/volume ratio jumped 50% from 0.33x last year to today’s 0.49x. But this progress wasn’t smooth; during this 50 basis point increase, there were multiple peaks and valleys:

First phase (February–May 2025): Quiet period. The OI/volume ratio averaged about 0.46x, with average OI around $4.8 billion and average daily volume about $11.5 billion.

Second phase (June–mid October): Surge period. The ratio averaged around 0.72x. During this time, average OI rose to $14.8 billion, with daily volume reaching $23 billion. This not only marked a new high in trading volume but also indicated increased risk exposure and greater capital deployment into these derivatives.

Third phase: Market reversal. This phase began with the large liquidation on October 10, which wiped out over $19 billion of leveraged positions within 24 hours. From mid-October to late December, the OI/volume ratio declined to about 0.38x, mainly driven by rising trading volume while open interest stagnated. October, November, and December set new records for monthly trading volume in 2025, each exceeding $1.2 trillion. Meanwhile, average OI was about $15 billion, slightly below the previous three months’ average.

Protocol Layer

Here, I want to add more dimensions at the protocol level. This helps us understand how effectively perpetual exchanges convert trading activity into “stickiness” capital and revenue.

As of February 10, the top five perpetual exchanges by 24-hour trading volume are:

Hyperliquid: Its OI to 7-day average daily trading volume ratio exceeds 45%, indicating a large portion of trading volume is converted into persistent positions. This suggests that for every $10 traded on the platform, $4.50 is deployed into active positions. This is significant because a high OI ratio leads to narrower spreads, deeper liquidity, and confidence to scale trades without slippage.

Hyperliquid’s fee revenue reinforces this story. Its take rate is about 3.2 basis points, turning the majority of 24-hour trading volume into fee income.

Aster: Currently ranked second, with nearly half the trading volume of Hyperliquid, but still maintains a healthy 34% capital efficiency (OI/Vol). However, its monetization capability is notable—due to a relatively low take rate (around 1.6 bps), Aster clearly prioritizes platform capital retention over maximizing fees.

edgeX and Lighter: Both perform similarly on the capital efficiency ladder, with OI/Vol ratios of 21%. However, edgeX’s fee monetization is comparable to Hyperliquid, at 2.8 bps.

Summary

It’s remarkable that today’s perpetual markets are no longer just stories of growth; they require nuanced interpretation across multiple metrics. On a macro level, trading volume has exploded: the cumulative perpetual trading volume over six months exceeds the total of the previous four years. But only when OI and volume are read together does the picture become clear.

A more definitive victory lies in the growth of the OI/volume ratio. This is a direct signal that “patience capital” is willing to trust and bet on the various products and markets emerging within perpetual exchanges.

Looking ahead, it’s more interesting to see how individual players evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, exchanges that can optimize “conviction” and achieve sustainable monetization will be far more important than those merely dominating trading volume rankings through incentives and rewards.