Everyone has the perps convergence backwards
Perpetual futures contracts, originally a crypto-native product, are increasingly being applied to traditional assets like gold, equities, and commodities. This shift is driven by the efficiency of decentralized, 24/7 market structures compared to traditional financial venues.
Why it matters
The migration of traditional assets onto crypto-built market infrastructure represents a significant convergence between decentralized finance and legacy financial systems.
The scale is easy to underestimate. Perps are the deepest and most liquid instrument in crypto , with daily volumes that have approached three-quarters of a trillion dollars and that routinely run several times the size of the spot markets they reference. Their design stripped out the two features that define a traditional future, the expiry and the settlement date, and replaced them with a funding rate that keeps the contract anchored to spot. For most of their history, they were treated as a crypto-native product with little relevance beyond it.
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