Crypto perp volumes on stocks hit $1.32T in five months

Monthly volume in perpetual futures tied to stocks, indexes and commodities on crypto exchanges rose from $230 million in January 2025 to $347.17 billion in May 2026, according to CoinGecko. The first five months of 2026 alone produced $1.32 trillion in volume, up from $104.21 billion across all of 2025.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen told CoinDesk the shift has reshaped her exchange's business.

"A year ago, we didn't even have a perpetual stock product; 100% of our volume came from crypto," Chen said. "A year later, we now have about 28% of our total trading volume coming from the stock business, and those are mainly stock perpetuals."

Executives call the trend the "reverse bridge." Traditional finance spent the last two years bringing crypto into regulated products such as ETFs and custody services. Now crypto exchanges are listing perpetuals on Wall Street assets. The underlying shares do not move onto the platforms. Stock perps are contracts tied to share prices. They provide no ownership, voting rights or regulatory protections. Traders want the 24/7 exposure without holding the actual stock.

S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed its S&P 500 benchmark to Trade XYZ, a platform on the Hyperliquid blockchain. The partnership produced the first officially approved onchain S&P 500 perpetual futures contract, letting non-U.S. individuals trade the American equity benchmark around the clock.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, crypto platforms listed about 360 traditional-asset products across spot and perps, according to CoinGecko. The platforms averaged 75 traditional-asset perp listings each, compared with only 37 spot listings.

Traditional futures expire. Perps do not. Funding rate payments between traders keep the contract price close to the underlying asset. That structure appeals to both retail and institutional users, executives said.

Augie Ilag, an investor at CMT Digital, said the appeal for institutions is speed, not access.

"For institutions, this isn't really an access story," Ilag said. "They already have brokerages and OTC desks; the issue is friction."

Retail investors outside the U.S. face a different problem. In markets dominated by a small number of local stocks, buying Tesla shares or gaining S&P 500 exposure is not simple.

"So it's friction for institutions and genuine access for retail," Ilag said. He added that he had not seen data splitting volume between the two groups.

Stock perps remain small compared with traditional equities. The CoinGecko report shows tokenized stock-perp volume accounted for less than 1% of trading in the underlying stock markets. Still, the absolute figure rose from $831 million in July 2025 to $34 billion in May 2026.

Round-the-clock trading is only part of the plan. Coinbase and Binance want customers to trade crypto, stocks and other products through one account, a model they describe as an "everything exchange" or financial super app.

Coinbase secured investment-services authorization from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority under MiFID rules. The authorization lets Coinbase offer traditional shares to retail customers, plus crypto, equity and commodity perps to eligible institutional and advanced traders.

"Perpetual futures are a core focus of what Coinbase is trying to bring to market," said Keith Grose, Coinbase's U.K. CEO, in an interview with CoinDesk. "We're really focused on being the 'everything exchange.'"

Grose said the longer-term plan includes spot crypto, perpetual futures, traditional equities, and eventually tokenized versions of other assets in one place. Customers could use positions across different markets as collateral or borrow against equities.

Binance is testing a similar model. Shunyet Jan, the exchange's head of trading market structure, said some high-net-worth clients can use tokenized stock positions as collateral for other trades.

"We recognize you could have Nvidia or SpaceX stock, a tokenized version," Jan said. "You could actually have a tokenized stock put on our exchange, and we'll use that as collateral for you to trade something else. It could be a crypto derivative."

Jan said Binance extended a system that already allowed crypto as collateral to include traditional assets. He added that the exchange had recreated decades of U.S. market structure in two weeks, and "now that's expanded to TradFi assets."

Large funds are not yet placing much long-term risk on decentralized exchanges. Ilag said funds would need clear rules for custody and clearing, protections comparable to central clearing, and institutional-grade custody services.

"That will take years," Ilag said. "Near term, I'm skeptical of inflows to decentralized venues."

Licensed centralized exchanges that settle through crypto systems will attract more institutional business in the near term, he said. Hacks and smart-contract security concerns remain barriers for decentralized platforms.

"What most people want isn't the ideology of decentralization but a strong product, like a perp on a traditional index, with a license and guarantees behind it," Ilag said.

To offer traditional products, crypto exchanges still need benchmark data, licenses, banks, custodians and market makers.

"The assets are why people show up, as everyone wants the exposure," Ilag said. "The lasting advantage is what this does to market structure."