1. Executive Summary

Equity perpetual futures (equity perps) allow market participants to gain synthetic exposure to traditional equity markets on decentralized venues without relying on brokers or centralized intermediaries. Perpetual futures are arguably crypto’s most successful financial innovation. They solved the complexity and access barriers of traditional derivatives, allowing 24/7 trading and simple leverage without expiry. This simplicity has proved so effective that perps overtook options and futures as the dominant trading instrument for crypto markets.

 

The same model could now be exported back to traditional finance. If equity perps succeed, they may mark the first time a crypto-native market structure reshapes TradFi, rather than the other way around. By mirroring stock price movements while operating on permissionless infrastructure, they combine the global accessibility and 24/7 liquidity of crypto markets with exposure to some of the most widely traded assets in the world. This convergence has the potential to blur the line between TradFi and DeFi, enabling new forms of trading, hedging, and market participation.

 

Equity perps are not an entirely new idea. Over the past few cycles, multiple protocols attempted to bring stocks onchain through synthetic representations, but most early efforts failed to achieve meaningful traction due to high costs, fragile oracle designs, liquidity fragmentation, regulatory pressure, and a fundamental mismatch between market hours and 24/7 trading. What has changed in recent years is the emergence of high-performance perp DEX infrastructure, improvements in oracle design, better risk engines, and increased willingness of market makers to support structured liquidity for traditional assets. 

 

The implications extend beyond speculation. Equity perps can offer efficient exposure for global users, enable structured products, improve hedging strategies for DAOs or treasuries, and potentially act as building blocks for more complex onchain capital markets. At the same time, they inherit a unique set of technical, economic, and regulatory challenges distinct from crypto-native perps.

 

This report aims to provide a comprehensive view of the current equity perp DEX landscape. It is structured into three parts:

 

1. A review of the equity perps opportunity and market sizing.
   
   
2. An exploration of the different perp DEX implementations and oracle designs, with an overview of the current landscape.
   
   
3. An analysis of core challenges, criticisms, and opportunities ahead.

 

2. Market Sizing and Context: The 0DTE, CFD Opportunity

 

For onchain equity perps, the real upside lies not only in the total market of equities derivatives, but in capturing the retail trader demographic that currently drives abundant flow through same-day, leveraged equity instruments. These traders seek fast exposure to equities, high leverage and quick returns. Today they turn to 0DTE (zero-days-to-expiry) options. Perps present a simpler, more accessible vehicle for the same behavioural flow.

What the 0DTE market looks like

● In May 2025, 0DTE contracts tied to the S&P 500 (SPX) made up over 61% of all SPX options volume. Retail traders were responsible for roughly 54% of that 0DTE volume.

Source: Cboe Global Markets

●  Separately, research estimates that the 0DTE/options market on indexes averages over US$500 billion in notional per day.

Source: Cboe Global Markets

● Many retail traders treat 0DTE as “modern lottery tickets”. These traders mostly have small capital, use high leverage and want an immediate payoff. This mindset overlaps strongly with the appeal of onchain perpetuals.

Figure: Share of 0-day-to-expiry (0DTE) contracts in SPX options volume (2016–2025 YTD). 0DTE now accounts for over 60% of SPX options, underscoring the growing retail appetite for short-duration leveraged exposure.

 

Translating into Onchain Equity Perps Revenue Potential

 

Assume the following conservative framework:

● Total 0DTE notional: US$500 billion per day (index only) 
Retail share (exposed to levered, fast-turnover trades): 50%, or US$250 billion/day.

● Suppose equity perps manage to capture 5% of that retail flow (US$12.5 billion/day notional).

●  If a perp DEX captures fees + funding equivalent to say 5 basis points (0.05%) of notional per day, it gives us US$6.25 million/day.

●  Annualised (365 trading days) ≈ US$2.281 billion/year in revenue potential for the protocols that execute well.

If the capture rate rises to 10%, the same math yields US$4.56 billion/year. Thus, even modest migration of retail 0DTE flow into onchain equity perps opens a billion-dollar scale revenue opportunity.

Why this is compelling

● Retail traders already demonstrate an appetite for short-duration, high-leverage equity exposure.

● Onchain perps offer global access with no brokers and middlemen, and no KYC. This dramatically lowers friction - making perps naturally attractive to that cohort.

●  The protocols that get infrastructure, UX, liquidity, and regulation right could capture a substantial slice of an existing demographic of retail equity traders, rather than creating demand from scratch.

A New Source of Capital Inflow

Over the past several years, the onchain ecosystem has lacked a fresh injection of high-quality underliers and meaningful new capital inflows. Two closely related constraints now hamper growth:

1. 1. There are only a few crypto assets that consistently attract liquidity and institutional interest. For example, there are 590 spot markets on Binance. Of this, the top 18 spot markets on Binance account for 80% of all spot volume, while the other 572 make up the remaining 20% of volume.
      
      
      
      
   2. After the recent wave of ETFs and Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs), there is little to no marginal inbound liquidity entering the market.
      
      

Introducing equity perpetuals (perps) offers a dual solution. First, it expands the universe of tradable assets from crypto assets to potentially hundreds of equities and indices, thereby opening up the market from recycling capital among the same assets toward new external flows. Second, it creates a structure designed to onboard non-crypto native capital. Some examples of these are: retail traders who solely trade equities, hedge funds limited in shorting opportunities and global investors seeking 24/7 access. In other words, equity perps could become the next major onchain liquidity gateway, capturing flows that previously either stayed in TradFi or simply never considered crypto.

If executed properly with strong oracles and deep liquidity, this could mark a structural shift from crypto (ex-Bitcoin) being seen as a niche loop and instead being seen as a global trading layer for equities.

 

3. TradFi Shorting Constraints and Why Perps Matter

Shorting equities in traditional markets remains one of the most structurally constrained activities in finance. According to S3 Partners and Goldman Sachs Prime Brokerage, global equity short interest typically hovers between 2–3% of total market capitalization. Yet this exposure is supply-constrained: it cannot expand meaningfully because it depends on how much stock lenders make available, primarily through prime brokers and custodians.

Borrow Supply and Cost Landscape

• ION Group reports that roughly US $1.3 trillion in U.S. equities is on loan at any given time with the majority being equities, compared to US $60 trillion+ in total market cap, meaning only about 2-3% of the market is shortable at any one time.
  
  

• Borrow rates (the annualized fee to short) vary dramatically:

• General collateral (liquid large caps): 0.3–1.5% annualized

• Hard-to-borrow mid-caps or crowded shorts: 5–20% annualized

• Specials (extremely illiquid names): >50%, sometimes 100%+ (examples include GameStop, AMC, Carvana during 2021–2023)
  
  

• Recall risk is significant: lenders can pull back inventory on short notice, forcing traders to cover. S3 Partners data shows over 5% of borrow recalls occur within 10 days for crowded names.
  
  

Ultimately, this means traders are not limited by conviction or capital, but by inventory access and borrow rates being controlled by intermediaries and counterparties. This also means that retail access to shorting is also usually less accessible.

Perpetual Futures as an Alternative

Perpetual futures completely bypass this structure. Short positions are created synthetically via open interest with no inventory and no risk of recall. The cost of holding a short is expressed through the funding rate, which fluctuates based on long-short demand imbalance.

Empirical averages from leading crypto perp venues show:

• BTC/ETH perps typically have daily funding between ±0.01–0.03%, equivalent to 3.6–11% annualized.
  
  

• Even during volatile periods, sustained annualized funding above 20% is rare.
  
  

• By contrast, hard-to-borrow equities in TradFi routinely cost 15 to 50% annually in borrow fees, making perps structurally cheaper and more flexible for expressing bearish exposure.
  
  

By comparison, onchain perps can scale to any open interest level the market can collateralize. On Hyperliquid, for example, aggregate open interest exceeds US $9 billion with fully symmetric long/short distribution, demonstrating that synthetic liquidity can absorb large directional flow without needing physical borrow.

If the same dynamic is applied to equities, it could meaningfully expand the global capacity for short exposure beyond the 3% float ceiling seen in TradFi. More importantly, it democratizes access for all traders to express directional views on equities without intermediaries or brokers.

4. Current Equity Perp DEX Landscape

TradeXYZ

TradeXYZ represents the most direct attempt yet to build a permissionless equity perp market using high-performance crypto-native infrastructure. Built on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, TradeXYZ inherits a fully onchain CLOB that allows for price discovery, their own margining framework, and transparent funding logic.

The platform debuted with XYZ100, a weighted basket of the top 100 NASDAQ stocks, and plans to expand into single-name equities over the coming months. During open sessions, oracles are anchored to external institutional feeds via Pyth, while during closures, the system applies an internal smoothing and banding mechanism that limits price drift.

This design ensures prices move gradually even when underlying markets are closed, a major advantage over synthetic systems that must halt trading. Because liquidity and execution occur entirely onchain, TradeXYZ can maintain continuous price discovery through user activity rather than static oracle updates. Early data suggests its weekend pricing tracks closely with NASDAQ futures, making it one of the few venues where genuine price discovery continues after hours.

TradeXYZ’s integration on HIP-3 also signals a broader shift: exchanges are no longer isolated frontends but composable markets that anyone can build on. This could become the foundation for future onchain equity indices, structured products, and ETF-style wrappers.

 

Ostium

Ostium is one of the earliest functioning equity perp platforms and remains the best-known example of a synthetic pool model adapted to real-world assets. The protocol allows traders to gain exposure to stocks, indices, and commodities through a central liquidity pool known as the Ostium Liquidity Pool (OLP), where liquidity providers take the other side of user trades.

Daily equity perp volume averages around US$7 million, though most activity is still concentrated in gold and major indices. Ostium uses a pull-based Real-World Asset Oracle developed in-house and operated with Stork, designed to aggregate price data from multiple traditional finance sources with asset-specific logic. This ensures secure and scalable feeds across different trading schedules.

However, trading halts outside regular market hours, and funding is either paused or extrapolated during closures. While the OLP model helped bootstrap early liquidity, it is now showing limits as its growth depends on continuous trader losses to reward LPs, and reliance on external quoting restricts scalability. Even so, Ostium deserves credit for proving that real-world assets can be traded onchain through a functional perp interface.

Vest

Vest takes the opposite approach. It uses a central limit order book (CLOB) architecture similar to centralized exchanges like Binance or Bybit, offering deeper liquidity and real-time price discovery. Vest aggregates live pricing data from NASDAQ, NYSE, CBOE, and Pyth, creating one of the most complete oracle coverage systems among current players.

Trading continues through extended hours using CBOE EDGX (pre- and post-market) and BlueOcean ATS (overnight), with the weekend price anchored to the last official close plus a volatility spread. This allows Vest to maintain continuous trading across almost the entire week, a key differentiator for equities that normally operate within fixed hours.

By combining onchain transparency with professional-grade market data, Vest delivers credible pricing and low tracking error during open sessions. Its biggest challenge lies in maintaining meaningful volume over weekends when volatility is artificially constrained. Still, Vest currently stands out as one of the more robust attempts at a continuously priced equity perp venue.

 

Gains Network

Gains Network brings a familiar brand from crypto into the equities space through its gTrade platform. It uses the same GLP-style architecture popularized by GMX, where users trade against protocol vaults rather than through direct market matching. Prices are sourced from four separate Chainlink node providers, providing redundancy and aggregation across multiple feeds.

Gains supports a wide range of global equities, commodities, and forex pairs, but it restricts trading to active market hours and pauses during closures. This simplifies oracle management but limits liquidity continuity. Its strength lies in accessibility and retail reach. The product is simple to use and integrates well with the existing DeFi ecosystem. However, like Ostium, its design inherently caps scalability and after-hours functionality.

 

Comparative Overview

 

5. Perp DEX Implementations

Perp DEXs supporting equities can take two distinct approaches:

• CLOB-based implementations: High-performance matching engines like Hyperliquid enable efficient order routing and tight spreads via onchain orderbooks - similar to how centralized exchange trading works on Binance, Bybit etc.
  
  

• Synthetic quoting models (GLP-style): Platforms like Ostium use offchain dealers and RFQ flows with onchain settlement, with positions synthetically held and traded against a centralised vault, made popular by GMX.
  
  

CLOB-Based Implementations (Hyperliquid, TradeXYZ)

Central limit order book (CLOB) architectures represent the most scalable model for perpetual DEXs, offering genuine price discovery, depth transparency, and high-frequency matching that mirrors centralized exchanges. Unlike pool-based systems, CLOBs allow traders to interact directly with other participants through bids and asks, enabling organic discovery of equilibrium prices and funding rates rather than relying on external quotes.

With the introduction of HIP-3, Hyperliquid became the first platform to support permissionless market creation. This allows any user to list a new perpetual market, including equities or synthetic assets, using onchain collateral and automated risk parameters. HIP-3 effectively transforms Hyperliquid from a closed exchange into a fully composable onchain trading layer, with oracles, margining, and settlement logic integrated natively into the chain.

TradeXYZ’s integration on HIP-3 builds on this foundation, and has gone live with equity perp listings, firstly starting with XYZ100 (a weighted basket of the top 100 stocks on the NASDAQ) and will be bringing single-name stocks soon. Unlike GLP-style designs, this structure ensures continuous price discovery even when external reference markets are closed, as prices are derived from live market activity rather than static external oracles. This meant that Trade.xyz might have been one of the most accurate venues for NASDAQ100 price discovery over the weekend of the 27th of October (case study below). 

Vest operates similarly. It runs a CLOB-based system that aggregates data from multiple exchanges and institutional providers (including NASDAQ, NYSE, CBOE, and Pyth) to ensure accurate pricing and strong liquidity coverage. Vest’s structure mirrors the efficiency of centralized markets while retaining the transparency and settlement benefits of onchain trading. Together with Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ, it represents the leading wave of CLOB-style perpetual exchanges aiming to bridge TradFi and DeFi trading behaviors.

 

Case study: Weekend price discovery on XYZ100

Credit: @0xmev on Twitter

During the weekend of 27th and 28th October, XYZ100 on Hyperliquid showed early signs of real price discovery for equities outside traditional hours. On Sunday 4 pm ET, XYZ100 traded around 25,460, roughly +0.4% above Friday’s close at 25,360. When CME reopened one to two hours later, futures opened +0.8%, confirming the same direction.

 

Traders on Hyperliquid had bid above oracle price, paying funding to position for that move, effectively predicting the post-open adjustment before legacy markets did. While small in scale, it demonstrated how onchain perpetual markets can surface genuine price signals during off hours, hinting at their potential to become a continuous layer of global price discovery for equities.

 

The GLP/OLP Model (Ostium, Gains)

The GLP-style architecture, used by Ostium and Gains Network, synthetically fills orders against a centralized vault rather than through a true orderbook. Traders settle profit and loss directly with the protocol’s liquidity pool called OLP on Ostium and g(asset) vaults on Gains, similar to GMX’s GLP model.

During market hours, oracles pull prices from external feeds to mark trades, but because the vault is always the counterparty, TradFi market makers must quote and hedge exposure off-platform to mimic an orderbook and maintain delta neutrality. This setup allows Ostium to functionally emulate an orderbook but introduces dependency on external venues for hedging.

While this model bootstrapped early liquidity, it introduces scaling challenges. The vault must take the other side of user trades, meaning LPs profit only when traders lose, resulting in a zero-sum structure. Unlike Hyperliquid’s HLP, where pricing is dynamic and liquidity can be hedged onchain, the OLP’s static pricing restricts growth.

For instance, Ostium’s gold market has around $4M in open interest compared to $15M on Hyperliquid’s new PAXG market, despite lower funding rates on Ostium. Out of Ostium’s $57M TVL, $28M (or 50%) sits in the OLP, showing how dependent the protocol remains on this mechanism. Without moving beyond the GLP-style structure, Ostium’s model will likely cap its scalability.

Another important limitation of this design is that pricing depends entirely on external quoting rather than onchain price discovery. Because the model lacks a live market mechanism to continuously update prices, trading must stop during periods when the underlying TradFi markets are closed. This prevents after-hours activity and further restricts liquidity growth, creating a sharp contrast to onchain orderbook systems like Hyperliquid that maintain continuous pricing through synthetic and internal funding rate calculations.

 

6. Oracle Implementations

Oracle prices are at the heart of how perpetual exchanges function. Every perp market needs a reliable reference price to calculate funding rates, which are what keep the perp price anchored to the underlying asset. Funding payments flow between longs and shorts based on the difference between the perp’s mark price and the oracle price.

 

When the perp trades above the oracle, funding turns positive, meaning longs pay shorts a small % of their notional position every funding interval. This creates an incentive to short or for longs to close positions and rotate to spot, which pulls the perp price back down toward the oracle. The opposite happens when the perp trades below the oracle: funding becomes negative, shorts pay longs, and buyers are encouraged to take the other side.

For crypto perps, this process is straightforward. The oracle simply tracks the live spot market, updating continuously. But equities are different. Stock markets have fixed trading hours, which means there are long periods with no new spot prices to reference. During these times, the funding mechanism has nothing to anchor to.

The result is a fundamental design problem: how do you maintain a functioning perp market when the underlying asset stops trading? Exchanges either have to pause trading entirely, extrapolate prices through synthetic or internal models, or rely on alternative feeds from after-hours venues. Each approach carries tradeoffs in stability and accuracy.

This is why oracle design is one of the most important differentiators for equity perp exchanges. It determines how often prices update, how funding behaves, and whether a market can remain open and efficient when traditional exchanges are closed.

To make the comparison clearer, oracle designs can be split into two broad categories: market hours and outside market hours. Market hours oracles rely on direct external feeds from exchanges or liquidity providers, while outside market hours require either fallback mechanisms or rely on synthetic pricing models.

Market Hours

During active trading sessions, oracles typically rely on real-time external feeds to provide accurate pricing.

• Vest: Aggregates NASDAQ, NYSE, CBOE, and Pyth. Offers one of the most complete real-time feeds among current players.
  
  

• TradeXYZ (HIP-3): Primarily uses external institutional feeds (e.g., Pyth) to anchor funding and mark pricing during market hours.
  
  

• Gains / Ostium: Rely on simpler external price feeds or dealer pricing during open sessions, with less granularity compared to Vest.
  
  

Outside Market Hours

Once traditional equity markets close, venues diverge in how they handle pricing. Since there is no official market price after hours, they must either (a) stop trading or (b) use a synthetic pricing solution.

• No trading allowed: Gains and Ostium avoid the complexity of after-hours pricing entirely by not supporting trading outside standard sessions.
  
  

• Custom internal solution: TradeXYZ uses an internal smoothing and banding mechanism that allows for controlled movement around the last external price.
  
  

• External after-hours feeds: Vest uses CBOE EDGX for pre- and post-market pricing and BlueOcean ATS for overnight sessions, with last close plus a volatility spread on weekends.

 

Why Oracle Design Matters

Equities require more nuanced oracle handling than crypto because of limited trading hours, pre- and post-market liquidity, and regulatory boundaries. These design choices shape funding volatility, tracking error, and how users trade around market opens and closes. This section covers four representative venues: Gains, Vest, TradeXYZ, and Ostium.

TradeXYZ (HIP-3)

Active Hours

• Uses institutional-grade pricing through Pyth and other data partners.

• External reference prices anchor both funding and mark calculations.

Outside Hours

• When external prices are unavailable, TradeXYZ applies an internal smoothing mechanism to limit abrupt moves.

• Prices can move only within a volatility band tied to leverage (for example, ±$500 on a $10,000 asset with 20x leverage).

• Thin liquidity is ignored to maintain stability.

 

Vest

Active Hours

• Aggregates live feeds from NASDAQ, NYSE, CBOE, and Pyth.

• Funding is continuously calculated during these hours.

Outside Hours

• Pre-market (4 a.m.–9:30 a.m.) and post-market (4 p.m.–8 p.m.) data come from CBOE EDGX.

• Overnight (8 p.m.–4 a.m.) pricing is sourced from BlueOcean ATS, the largest overnight equities venue.
  Weekend sessions use the last market close as the base price, allowing limited movement through a volatility spread.

 

Ostium

Active Hours

• Uses a pull-based Real-World Asset Oracle, developed in-house and operated in partnership with Stork.

• Data is aggregated from multiple traditional finance sources with asset-specific logic for equities, commodities, and forex.

• Designed to handle events like futures rolls, price gaps, and market closures.
  
  

Outside Hours

• Trading stops completely once official exchanges close.
  Because no trading occurs, no synthetic or interim oracle updates are needed.
  
  

Gains

Active Hours

• Uses a custom oracle built from data aggregated by four separate Chainlink node providers, ensuring redundancy and cross-validation.

• Prices are refreshed continuously during open sessions, and funding is derived directly from these feeds.

Outside Hours

• Markets close when external trading halts, and no new data is fed to the oracle until markets reopen.

• This avoids reliance on synthetic or low-liquidity pricing.
  
  

7. Criticisms and Structural Limitations of Bringing Equities Onchain via Perps

While equity perps present a clear technical breakthrough, they face several challenges that make adoption and scaling difficult. These limitations are not simply engineering problems but reflect deeper structural differences between equities as long term investment instruments and perps as short term trading tools.

1. Long term instruments in a short term wrapper

Equities are designed for investors who hold positions over longer periods to benefit from compounding, dividends, and favorable tax treatment. Perpetual contracts, on the other hand, are built for short term trading and rely on continuous funding payments to keep prices aligned with spot.

In traditional markets, investors who hold equities for more than a year pay lower capital gains tax rates. Perp traders pay or receive funding continuously and do not benefit from any long term tax advantages. This creates a structure where speculation dominates, and few incentives exist for investors to hold positions for extended periods.

2. Loss of dividends and yield

Dividends are an important source of return for many established companies. With perps, that yield disappears.

• Long positions receive no dividend income, which lowers total returns compared to owning the actual stock.
  
  

• Short positions benefit because they are not responsible for paying dividends.
  
  

This asymmetry can distort funding dynamics and create persistent biases between long and short positions. Around ex-dividend dates, these effects can cause sharp funding swings and unpredictable market behavior. However, I do expect several no-arbitrage conditions to hold where the expected dividend payout is represented as a negative funding rate such that holding a long perp position should roughly receive an equal amount in funding as they would have holding spot position with a dividend.

3. Regulatory opacity and counterparty risk

Equity markets are heavily regulated, with clear oversight, mandatory disclosures, and established investor protections. Perp exchanges, especially decentralized ones, operate outside these frameworks.

There are no guarantees of solvency, no standardized insurance for users, and little visibility into how risk is managed internally. Some centralized exchanges in the past have used undisclosed liquidation or hedging arrangements, which makes it difficult for traders to assess their real exposure.

For participants accustomed to regulated markets, this uncertainty creates a high barrier to entry. Institutional traders, in particular, are unlikely to engage in meaningful size until legal clarity, reporting standards, and counterparty protections improve.

4. Lack of investor protections

Traditional brokerage accounts in the United States are insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), which protects up to $500,000 of customer assets in the event of failure. Perp exchanges, whether centralized or onchain, offer no equivalent coverage.

While crypto native traders accept this risk, equity investors view protection as a baseline expectation. If perps aim to attract this broader demographic, exchanges must eventually compete not only on speed and liquidity but also on the quality of user safeguards.

5. No ownership or governance link

Owning a stock grants voting rights, dividend entitlement, and eligibility for corporate actions. Owning a perpetual contract does not. Equity perps provide exposure to price movements only.

In traditional markets, ownership encourages long term holding and helps stabilize prices through a base of committed investors. Removing that ownership layer turns the market into one driven entirely by speculative flow. As a result, perp markets are more reactive to sentiment, positioning, and funding conditions than to fundamentals.

6. Overnight dislocations and price gaps

Equities trade during fixed hours, but perps operate continuously. During market closures, oracle systems rely on alternative data sources such as dark pool feeds, after hours trading venues, or synthetic references. These sources often have limited liquidity and can drift from the true underlying price.

When the equity market reopens, the gap between the onchain synthetic price and the real market price can cause sharp moves, wider spreads, and volatile funding adjustments. Until traders and liquidity providers become familiar with these transitions, periods around open and close will continue to see elevated risk and unpredictable behavior.

8. Conclusion

Equity perps represent one of the most interesting frontiers for digital markets. For years, innovation in finance has mostly moved from traditional markets into crypto, but this time it might flow in the opposite direction. The perpetual futures model that changed how crypto is traded could now reshape how people gain exposure to equities.

Perps have already shown how powerful simple design can be. They have allowed for round-the-clock trading, and created a unified structure for leverage and price discovery. Extending that same idea to equities could open up an entirely new way for traders around the world to participate in stock markets without brokers, intermediaries, or regional barriers.

The opportunity is not theoretical. The explosion of 0DTE options shows how much appetite there is for fast, leveraged equity exposure. These contracts now make up over sixty percent of SPX option volume, with roughly half driven by retail traders. That same trading behavior of short-term, high-turnover, and increased risk taking maps almost perfectly onto what perps already enable. Even capturing a small fraction of that activity could turn into billions of dollars in annualized trading revenue for onchain platforms.

There’s also a clear structural case. Shorting in traditional markets remains limited by borrow supply, collateral requirements, and high fees. Only a small share of equities are even available to short at a given time, and borrow rates for difficult names can climb into double digits. With perps, these constraints disappear. Short exposure scales with liquidity rather than inventory, and costs adjust naturally through funding rates. It’s an elegant, more flexible system for expressing both bullish and bearish views.

What makes this moment different from earlier synthetic stock experiments is that the infrastructure has finally caught up. Order book-based platforms like TradeXYZ via Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 now deliver real price discovery and deep liquidity, while improved oracle designs and risk engines make continuous pricing possible even when traditional markets are closed. Technology is no longer the bottleneck, and we should see the industry now shift toward pushing adoption and regulation.

Critics often argue that equities are long-term investments and that perps, by nature, promote short-term speculation. That criticism is understandable, but it misses the main point - that does not mean the product lacks value. The goal isn’t to replace long-term equity investing or dividend income, it’s to modernize the trading layer of equities and make it accessible to anyone, anywhere. Crypto perps did not make Bitcoin a better store of value, but they did make it the most liquid and tradable asset in the world. The same dynamic could play out here.

Equity perps have the potential to bring a fresh wave of participation and capital into DeFi. They open the door for global traders who have never touched crypto but understand markets. If this works, it could be the first time crypto truly influences traditional finance rather than the other way around. The idea is still early, but the direction should now feel much clearer. Equity perps could mark the next phase of crypto’s evolution from purely being a rail for crypto assets and instead housing all of finance - equities included.