Executive Summary

• Equity and commodity perpetuals (perps) are synthetic derivatives that track the price fluctuations of publicly-listed equities, indices, and commodities. They differ from tokenised stocks because they confer no actual ownership, dividends, or voting rights, and are instead designed for continuous, leveraged speculation.
• Trading volume for on-chain real-world asset (RWA) based perpetuals (including stocks, indices, commodities, foreign exchange, and bonds) surged by 162% from US$11.8 billion in December 2025 to $31.0 billion in January 2026. Hyperliquid's HIP-3 based platforms currently command the largest share of trading volume in this segment, with commodities and stock indices being the most dominant assets traded.
• Equity and commodity perps fill market gaps by offering continuous, leveraged exposure:
• • Off-Hours Hedging: Allow immediate hedging of cash equity positions in response to sudden news (e.g., by shorting a perpetual) when exchanges are closed, then unwinding the hedge when markets reopen.
  • Event-Driven Positioning: Enable exposure around specific events without managing complex options or expiries. In pre-IPO markets, they facilitate trading views on private-market valuations.
  • Directional Speculation and Leverage: Perpetuals provide a liquid, leveraged venue for short-term trading, complementing long-term spot positions and concentrating speculative activity in derivatives markets.
  • Flexible Short Exposure: Offer synthetic short exposure with fewer constraints than traditional shorting (e.g., no stock borrow required), which is useful for expressing bearish views or hedging downside risk in volatile names.
• Equities and commodities perps have a different risk frontier from crypto perps. One of the biggest hurdles is asynchronous market hours, which increases gap‑risk for market makers and can force wider spreads or lower leverage during off‑hours. Other major challenges include oracle dependency and pricing latency (which can lead to arbitrage), the funding rate paradox (accounting for dividends and cost of carry), and regulatory friction.
• Equities and commodity perps are increasingly viewed as a next driver of crypto development, and platforms that solve the problems of market asynchrony and oracle latency are well positioned to capture a large share of the projected trillion-dollar synthetic traditional market.

1. Introduction

At the same time, equities have become more volatile and speculative. Large-cap companies such as Tesla and Nvidia have experienced repeated sharp, news-driven price moves, reflecting an increase in high-turnover strategies. However, straightforward leveraged equity exposure remains difficult to access: spot leverage is limited, futures have expiries and require roll management, and options introduce non-linear payoffs that require complex management rather than clean directional exposure.

Stock perpetual contracts (stock perps) have emerged as a novel product, effectively bridging traditional finance (TradFi) products with the 24/7 efficiency of decentralised finance (DeFi) to offer a new trading experience. The emergence of equity and commodity perpetuals reflects a broader convergence between crypto-native market design and TradFil infrastructure.

The ’perpetual stock contract’ appearing in the crypto space (both in DeFi and centralised finance, or CeFi) is essentially a synthetic derivative that tracks the price fluctuations of US stocks. It allows users to trade on price movements of stocks like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia 24/7, without actually owning the underlying shares. Since no actual equity is held, users do not receive dividends or voting rights. It's more akin to speculating on the US stock price index than holding the stocks themselves. Its price is synchronised with US stock market data through oracles. Users can trade on rising or falling prices with leverage.

Stock perps are different from tokenised stocks. Tokenised stocks are digital assets representing underlying stocks held by custodians. These assets are issued on-chain and pegged to the value of the real-world stocks. The issuers maintain real equity relationships, which can include dividends, voting rights, and regulatory securities attributes, and these rights may be passed on to users depending on the specifics of the product design. In contrast, perpetual stock contracts neither correspond to actual holdings nor provide any rights; their sole purpose is to allow users to participate in US stock price fluctuations more conveniently and directly, on-chain or off-chain. Therefore, in terms of usage, compliance frameworks, and risk attributes, the two operate on completely different tracks.

The positioning of stock perpetual contracts is very clear: they are not ’on-chain stocks’, but rather ’on/off-chain derivatives’. For users globally seeking to participate in the US stock market with lower barriers to entry and higher efficiency, this product provides a completely new entry point. It also represents a potential trend towards integrating traditional financial derivatives across both DeFi and CeFi platforms.

This report examines the development of equity and commodity perpetuals for on-chain implementation, how they complement traditional markets, and their structural challenges.

2. On-Chain Equity and Commodity Perpetuals

Trading volume of the on-chain traditional assets (including stocks, commodities, foreign exchange, bonds) surged by 162% from US$11.8 billion in December 2025 to $31.0 billion in January 2026. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 based exchanges are among the fastest-growing and most ecosystem-developed infrastructures. Hyperliquid doesn't offer perpetual stock trading independently as an official contract. Instead, it utilises HIP-3, a’builder‑deployed perpetuals’ framework, which enables third-party builders to deploy perpetual trading products related to RWAs on top of its underlying trading system.

Since the introduction of HIP-3 on Hyperliquid in October 2025, HIP-3 based exchanges have reached a cumulative trading volume of $40.6 billion on traditional asset perps as of 2 February 2026. Among the categories, commodities have dominated trading volume since the end of January 2026, coinciding with the uptrend in gold and silver, followed by indices (e.g., XYZ100, which tracks Nasdaq 100) and stocks (e.g., NVDA and TSLA).

2.2 Classification

Public Equity and Commodity Perpetuals

Public equity perps track the prices of publicly listed assets (e.g., stocks, ETFs, precious metals) that are traded on traditional exchanges. On-chain implementations have converged around an order book based model and pool based perpetuals.

Order book based platforms use a central limit order book (CLOB) model, where prices are formed through bids and asks, oracle prices are used to calculate funding rates, and mark prices anchor margins and liquidations. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 based markets are representative of this model.

By contrast, liquidity pool based systems execute trades directly against protocol liquidity, with prices sourced from oracle feeds. This avoids the early-stage liquidity coordination problem of order books. However, because the protocol does not perform internal price discovery, strict constraints are imposed when oracle data is unavailable, including limited trading hours and capped overnight leverage. Ostium was designed using this pool based model.

2.3 Pre-IPO Equity Perpetuals

Pre-IPO equity perps extend the underlying assets to private companies that lack continuous public price discovery. Platforms such as Ventuals, built on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 infrastructure, offer perpetual exposure to private firms including OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic.

Because private markets lack continuous price discovery, stock prices are constructed from a weighted combination of the latest external valuation estimate and a two-hour incremental exponential moving average of the mark price (liquidity-weighted impact price from bids and asks on the platform). Price dynamics are mostly event-driven (e.g., fundraising announcements, secondary transactions) rather than continuous, with long periods of relative stability punctuated by sharp repricing around new developments.

Liquidity can be thinner, as there may not be deep underlying markets in which market makers can hedge exposure; therefore, Ventuals rewards maker activities via a points system to incentivise liquidity. 

The significance of these perps is that they address the illiquidity of private markets by mitigating the 'IPO pop' phenomenon, where companies often trade significantly higher once they have gone public. At the same time, they also give investors an opportunity to trade expectations about discrete valuation events, enabling speculative forecasting.

A key consideration is whether pre-IPO perpetual contracts possess genuine product-market fit. A primary use case is to democratise access and exposure to companies that are typically beyond the investment reach of everyday retail investors. However, venture-style investments typically require a very long holding period to realise asymmetric returns, and it is prohibitively expensive to hold perpetual contracts for an extended duration, often incurring high annualised funding fees of dozens of percent.

3. Use Cases and Challenges

3.1 Use Cases

Equity and commodity perpetuals address specific gaps in traditional markets by enabling continuous, leveraged exposure.

Weekend and Off-Hours Hedging: Cash equity positions cannot be adjusted when exchanges are closed. For example, If sudden news breaks over a weekend and an investor holds a long equity position, it cannot be unwound immediately. In such cases, the ability to short an equity perpetual provides a temporary hedge that can be removed once markets reopen.

Event-Driven Positioning: In pre-IPO markets, perpetuals enable traders to express views on valuation, creating a tradable mechanism for private-market expectations.

Directional Speculation and Leverage-Driven Trading: While spot equity and commodity positions can be suited for long-term exposure, perpetuals complement them by providing a liquid, leveraged venue for short-term trading. This separation allows speculative activity to concentrate in perps, potentially mirroring the role perpetuals play in crypto markets.

Easier and More Flexible Short Exposure: Shorting equities in traditional markets require stock borrow, margin approval and is often constrained or expensive. Equity perpetuals provide synthetic short exposure with relatively fewer constraints as they are scaled with liquidity. This can be valuable for volatile names and can serve as a means for traders to express bearish views or hedge downside risks.

3.2 Challenges 

Asynchronous Market Hours (The 'Weekend' Problem)

This is one of the biggest structural hurdles. Crypto never sleeps, but the New York Stock Exchange does.

• The Challenge: When the underlying stock market is closed but the perp trades 24/7, funding can drift purely on sentiment, with no hard spot anchor until the next cash session. This asymmetry increases gap risk for market makers and can force wider spreads or lower leverage during off‑hours.
• The Result: The perp itself trades on its own order book, so traders’ bids and asks determine the live contract price when the stock market is shut. When the oracle is stale, the exchange often continues to let the perp price move, but uses the last oracle mark (or a synthetic fair value) for risk calculations. Over weekends, the perp can trade at a premium/discount, with funding compensating the side taking the ‘wrong’ price until traditional markets reopen and the oracle updates.

Oracle Dependency and Pricing Latency

Crypto perps benefit from high-frequency, decentralised price feeds across dozens of global exchanges. By contrast, traditional asset perps rely on a 'bridge' from traditional silos.

• The Challenge: Stock oracles must translate data from centralised venues (e.g., Nasdaq, NYSE) into a decentralised environment. Even a 500-millisecond delay in oracle updates can lead to toxic arbitrage, where sophisticated bots front-run the oracle based on the real-time 'off-chain' stock price.
• The Result: Platforms often introduce 'slippage buffers' or artificial delays, which degrades the trading experience compared to the fast execution of crypto perps.

Funding Rate Paradox

In crypto, the funding rate is a simple mechanism where longs pay shorts (or vice versa) to keep the perp price aligned with spot.

• The Challenge: Stock prices are influenced by 'cost of carry' factors that do not exist in the same way for crypto. For example, if a stock perp does not offer dividends, the funding rate must be mathematically adjusted to compensate for the 'lost yield' that a spot holder would have received.
• The Result: Currently, most RWA-related perps are synthetic, cash-settled contracts that just track the price fluctuation of the underlying asset.

Handling Corporate Actions (Dividends and Splits)

Crypto assets rarely undergo 'stock splits' or 'mergers' in the traditional sense.

• The Challenge: When Nvidia executes a 10-for-1 split, a stock perp protocol must instantly adjust every open position, strike price, and oracle feed simultaneously.
• The Result: Any manual intervention or smart contract lag during these events introduces significant systemic risk. Most current protocols simply 'ignore' dividends, meaning the perp trades at a permanent discount/premium to the actual stock, which can confuse retail users.

Regulatory Friction (The 'Security' Label)

Perhaps the most daunting challenge is not technical, but legal.

• The Challenge: Regulators generally view any instrument that tracks a stock price as a security derivative. While crypto perps often operate on a different rail, stock perps are a direct target for agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
• The Result: This leads to fragmented liquidity. US-based traders are often geo-blocked from the most liquid stock perp platforms, forcing the market into 'dark pools' or offshore decentralised exchanges (DEXs), which increases counterparty risk due to regulatory uncertainty.

4. Conclusion

Equities and commodities perpetuals represent a next driver of asset tokenisation, but they are not just 'crypto perps for stocks’. The transition requires solving for market asynchrony and corporate action integration. As 2026 progresses, platforms that solve the oracle latency problem are well positioned to capture a lion's share of the projected trillion-dollar synthetic equity market.

Read the full report: Equity & Commodity Perpetuals

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Authors

Crypto.com Research and Insights team

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