The end point of all financial markets is Perp.

Written by: Jaleel Jia Liu

In a rental apartment in Gangnam, Seoul, a 27-year-old programmer stares at his computer screen late at night.

He is not gaming. What jumps on the screen is the position page of Hyperliquid, a long position in ETH perpetual contracts, with 20 times leverage, and the margin is his savings for three months. Because he has calculated another account: given the current housing prices in Seoul and his level of income, saving without expenditures, it would take him about thirty years to buy an ordinary apartment. But by then, he will be fifty-seven years old.

He is not an isolated case; he represents a generation.

By early 2025, over 16.2 million South Koreans held cryptocurrency accounts, accounting for about 32% of the national population, surpassing those with stock accounts. Within just a few weeks after Trump's election victory, more than 500,000 South Koreans opened new crypto trading accounts. An observation about this group describes them as young people in Seoul, acting with concentrated staking and high leverage, hundreds of thousands of accounts moving in roughly synchronized rhythms, creating a market impact that no single institutional investor could match.

You could call it a gambling culture, but it is also a rational act of desperation.

The same story unfolds in a different language on the other side of the globe.

Lagos, where the purchasing power of the Naira evaporates at a visible speed. In March 2025, after a sudden currency devaluation, on-chain trading volume in sub-Saharan Africa skyrocketed to nearly $25 billion in a month, against a backdrop of generally declining volumes in other global regions. About one-third of Nigerian adults hold or use cryptocurrency, making it the country with the highest adoption rate in the world. For many Nigerians, this is not speculation. In a country where even owning a bank account is difficult, it is the only trusted way to store value.

Mumbai, where the participation rate of Indian retail investors in derivative markets surged from 2% in 2018 to 41% in 2025. The number of trading accounts climbed from 36 million to 154 million in five years. A study by SEBI on nearly ten million individual stock derivative traders showed that over 40% of them are under 30 years old, and more than three-quarters have an annual income below the equivalent of 50,000 yuan, trading with extremely limited income cushions, engaging in high-leverage trading, and unable to stop despite warnings from regulators.

Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai, also serve as microcosms of the world. Contemporary young people have gathered around the same kind of instrument: perpetual contracts.

This is not a story of the cryptocurrency industry; this is a collective action driven by structural inequality, where young people globally use leveraged tools to fight against the relentless competition of the times.

A genius idea, thirty years in the making

Perpetual contracts (Perpetual Contract, referred to as Perp in the industry) are not an invention of the cryptocurrency space.

In 1993, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller formally proposed this concept. In his design, it is an ultimate cash settlement tool without an expiration date, capable of tracking the long-term value of illiquid assets, originally designed to hedge against real estate price risks.

However, this design was ahead of its time; the machinery of traditional finance is too heavy. Wall Street has built a massive system around fixed expiration dates, batch settlement, and centralized clearing. The old machine, driven by paper documents and layers of intermediaries, naturally rejects the flexibility of "never settling." Shiller's idea lay dormant in academic journals for more than twenty years, as no one had the capability or motivation to realize it.

Until 2016, Arthur Hayes of BitMEX introduced perpetual contracts into cryptocurrency.

In those two years, BitMEX rapidly rose from the margins to become an industry leader with its perpetual contracts.

The secret lies not in Bitcoin itself, but in how perpetual contracts freed a very ancient human impulse: directional betting with leverage. No expiration dates, no Greek letters, no rollovers, no exercising options. Only one judgment remains: up or down, and how many times.

a16z investment partner Jay Drain recently defined the essence of this matter in a widely discussed report: "Perpetual contracts strip away all the complexities of options, eliminating the need to choose strike prices, manage expiration dates, or worry about time decay eating away at a correct directional judgment. It retains only one thing: a pure bet on price movements. The explosive growth of 0DTE options has already proven the scale of this demand."

The 0DTE he mentions refers to another exploding product in the US stock market – zero-day-to-expiration options. In 2025, the average daily trading volume of 0DTE SPX reached 2.3 million contracts, a 51% year-on-year increase, accounting for 59% of the total options trading volume of the S&P 500. Retail investors account for 50% to 60% of this trading volume.

No need to wait, no complexity, just now, give me leverage.

Perp has pushed this demand to the extreme.

Numbers provide the most honest footnotes to this evolution. In 2025, the total trading volume of centralized exchange perpetual contracts reached $86.2 trillion, a 47% year-on-year increase; on-chain DEX perpetual contracts experienced even more astonishing growth, with annual trading volume of $6.7 trillion, a 346% increase. Perpetual contracts currently account for over 70% of all centralized crypto trading volumes and about 78% of all crypto derivatives trading volumes.

The nominal trading volume of Bitcoin perpetual contracts exceeds that of Bitcoin spot trading by about six times.

This "derivatives-dominant pricing" market structure has never occurred in any traditional asset class such as gold, crude oil, or the S&P 500.

Dopamine, tribes, and PNL: Trading as a lifestyle

The crazy spring of 2021 is the starting point for understanding all of this.

Robinhood simplified the complex financial games with its colorful interface and zero-commission slogan, turning them into a sliding game on mobile. This product design collided with the historical vacuum of global home isolation: tens of millions of young people holding government relief funds, losing access to traditional gambling venues like sports events, casinos, and bars, found the stock market to be the largest, only non-stop arena in the world.

Retail investors on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets discovered the hedge fund Melvin Capital's aggressive short position on GME, and gathered through social media to raise the stock price by dozens of times with call options, forcing Wall Street's top hedge fund to seek rescue due to margin calls.

The GME incident declared to the world: retail investors realized they could directly rewrite pricing logic through derivative leverage.

However, GME was merely a trigger; something deeper had already formed.

Modern trading apps increasingly resemble games: real-time fluctuating numbers, flashing red and green colors, alert sounds signaling trades. This is essentially a dopamine system of high-frequency feedback. In the past, trading required opening a computer and researching reports; now, on the subway, on the toilet, while waiting to buy coffee, a quick swipe on the phone can complete a bet. When the trading threshold is lowered enough, it becomes fragmented entertainment just like scrolling through short videos or playing mobile games.

PNL (profit and loss chart) has become the new business card. Screenshots of profits are proof of "ability," while self-deprecating comments about losses serve as "genuine" social currency. In Discord channels or on X, this real-time financial volatility is more impactful than any static life photo. People buying the same meme coin naturally form a community of interest; the emotional connection of "making money together" or "going to zero together" is much more solid than mere hobbies.

Thus, trading has become a daily social and lifestyle choice for a new generation of young people.

And among all trading tools, perpetual contracts are the most perfect dopamine carriers.

They lack the complexities of options and the expiry anxieties of futures. They only have positions, leverage, and unrealized profit and loss visible at all times. They resonate perfectly with this generation’s sense of time, emphasizing not three years’ holding, nor quarterly reviews, but this moment, tonight, the next two hours.

Traditional financial derivatives designed for risk management are being used by this new generation of retail investors as weapons for directional betting. Perp, with its extremely minimalist design and "fast, smooth, fierce" trading rhythm, perfectly meets this demand.

A class barrier hidden for two hundred years

However, the significance of perpetual contracts goes far beyond "a lower barrier to gambling."

It is breaking down an even older wall.

For a long time, the restrictive trading hours of traditional stock markets have acted as a hidden class barrier. Academic research reveals a startling fact: under the so-called "overnight drift" effect, a disproportionate portion of the long-term returns in US stocks has arisen outside of regular trading hours. Earnings announcements and significant news typically deliberately avoid opening hours; retail investors are locked in the 9 to 5 window, only able to watch prices jump in the first second of trading during market openings — profits that originally belonged to them have long been divided up by institutions with extended hours privileges.

Data coldly confirms this. If you bought AMC, a high-volatility favorite among retail investors, at market open and sold at open from 2019 to 2022, your capital would almost be wiped out, losing up to 99.6%; however, if you only held it overnight, the return during the same period would be as high as 30,000%.

This is not a story about luck. It is about the structural unequal distribution of information rights, time rights, and pricing rights – and this inequality has existed for two hundred years.

On-chain perpetual contract platforms may currently be the only infrastructure capable of truly breaking down this barrier.

This is no longer a theoretical concept. This March, during the panic weekend caused by the Iranian attack, while global stock exchanges were shut, retail investors could only anxiously scroll through social media, while Hyperliquid's oil perpetual contracts generated $1 billion in sales within 24 hours.

Hyperliquid is highly favored by a new generation of traders on Instagram

Meanwhile, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and Nasdaq have announced the launch of 24/7 trading services. The trading hour high wall, which has stood for two hundred years, is now being dismantled from both sides.

The endgame of RWA: Everything can become Perp

In the past, perpetual contract traders only bet on crypto assets — BTC, ETH, SOL, and a long list of altcoins.

This boundary is dissolving.

From the second half of 2025, despite the overall crypto market entering a downturn, RWA (real-world assets) perpetual contracts have risen against the trend. Several DEXs have launched contracts for commodities, stocks, and stock indices, extending tradable assets to NVIDIA, Samsung, SpaceX, as well as commodities like silver and palladium.

Recently, RWA assets temporarily accounted for 44% of Hyperliquid’s total trading volume, consistently being the highest revenue trading pair on the platform. Every weekend when traditional markets close, Hyperliquid's on-chain oil perpetual contracts become the only operational pricing machine for crude oil in the world.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ twice

This is a paradigm shift that is happening.

a16z explicitly stated in its latest outlook report: synthetic products (like perpetual contracts) offer deeper liquidity and are a more crypto-native RWA solution than simple tokenization. Essentially, this is a historical multiple-choice question of "perpetual contracts vs. tokenization," with the answer now becoming apparent.

Coinbase's institutional research is even more direct: as the long-term trend of global retail investor participation in US stocks continues, stock perpetual contracts are poised to become the preferred tool for the new generation of retail traders, combining 24/7 access with capital efficiency.

Capital has already caught a whiff of this direction.

On April 28, 2026, crypto derivatives platform Liquid announced it had completed a $18 million Series A funding round, led by Neo and Left Lane Capital, with agencies such as Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel participating. Previously, the company completed a $7.6 million seed round led by Paradigm, bringing total funding to $25.6 million.

Liquid was founded by Franklyn Wang, a former Two Sigma quantitative researcher and a Harvard graduate. He is 25 years old. Initially, the company was merely a perpetual contract aggregator, integrating on-chain derivatives exchanges like Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Ostium into one interface. Now, it has expanded to stocks, forex, commodities, and prediction markets, supporting over 500 trading instruments, and Polymarket positions can also be traded on it, with maximum leverage of up to 200 times.

Hundreds of millions of young people worldwide are waiting for a sufficiently simple tool that allows them to bet on the direction of the world with minimal friction.

And the top talents in traditional finance are all moving toward Perp.

Regulation is opening up; it will never get dark on-chain

In April 2026, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig announced in a public speech that the regulatory agency would establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for perpetual contracts "in the near future" in the United States.

His exact words were: "The previous government failed to create a path for these markets to exist onshore. Under my leadership, the CFTC will use all available tools to bring perpetual contracts and other new derivatives onshore, allowing them to thrive in both centralized and decentralized markets."

This is almost a public declaration of war.

Global exchanges have begun to rush. The parent company of Kraken acquired Bitnomial, which holds perpetual contract qualifications, for up to $550 million; Coinbase launched long-term futures products approaching perpetual contract designs; Robinhood announced it is introducing perp for US users; Polymarket and Kalshi have announced their entry into the perpetual contracts field. Even after Robinhood launched its prediction market, that product line traded 11 billion contracts in 2025, with over a million active users — the fastest-growing revenue line in the platform’s history.

Before this, the main market for perp was offshore platforms outside the US, where young people from Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, and São Paulo gathered, exchanging leverage acquired through concerns over fiat currency devaluation to bet on the direction of the world.

The official opening of the US market means that the deepest liquidity pools in the world and the most actively engaged financial tools of this era will meet on the same stage.

A blockchain trading platform called Hyperliquid, established in 2022, has already been able to challenge the world’s top centralized exchanges with its daily trading volume. A perpetual contract aggregator called Liquid, which only launched in August 2025, processed $3 billion in trading volume within eight months and has just completed a Series A funding round led by top venture capital firms.

They are all built on the same thing: Generation Z does not want to wait for markets to open. They do not want to fill out account opening documents. They do not want to pay for the layers of barriers that traditional finance has set up "to protect" them. What they want is the moment, leverage, and any asset with a story from any time zone.

In late 18th century New York, anyone could become a stockbroker, with no quotes and no fixed trading venue; trades typically happened beneath a sycamore tree by Wall Street, acting as a focus point where brokers and merchants traded stocks and government bonds, with trading time defined as "when everyone is there." When it got dark, people dispersed, and trading stopped.

But today, this tree has grown on the blockchain, and it will never get dark.