Perpetual contracts, which cryptocurrency platforms once created for trading digital assets without an expiration date, are now becoming a tool for accessing stocks, indexes, and commodities. Exchanges use mechanics familiar to crypto traders to provide access to traditional markets almost around the clock and within a single trading environment.
Until recently, the movement was mostly in the other direction: Wall Street was gradually letting cryptocurrencies into traditional finance through exchange-traded funds, custodial services, funds, and other regulated products. Now the crypto market is building a reverse route. Instead of waiting for classic institutions to open access to Bitcoin or Ethereum, crypto exchanges themselves are bringing stocks, indexes, and commodities to their platforms via perpetual futures products.
The scale of the shift is growing rapidly. According to CoinGecko, in the first five months of 2026, cryptocurrency exchanges traded $1.32 trillion in perpetual contracts linked to traditional assets. For comparison: in all of 2025, the volume was $104.21 billion. Monthly turnover rose from $230 million in January 2025 to $347.17 billion in May 2026.
For some platforms, this is no longer an experiment but a significant share of business. Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, said that a year ago the company had no perpetual stock product at all, and all trading volume was in cryptocurrencies. Now about 28% of Bitget’s total trading volume is related to equities, primarily perpetual contracts on stocks.
A year ago, we didn’t even have a perpetual stock product; 100% of our volume was in cryptocurrency. A year later, about 28% of our total trading volume is in the equities business, and that’s mostly perpetual stocks, said Gracy Chen.
Why This Is Called the Reverse Bridge
Market participants are increasingly calling what’s happening the “Reverse Bridge.” The meaning is simple: it’s not traditional financial companies bringing clients to cryptocurrencies, but crypto exchanges giving their users access to Wall Street instruments. This set includes stocks, stock indexes, commodities, and derivatives on them.
At the same time, the securities themselves in most cases do not move to cryptocurrency exchanges. Perpetual contracts on stocks are tied to their price but do not provide full ownership. The trader gets price exposure, not shareholder rights. They do not vote, do not own the underlying security directly, and, as a rule, do not receive dividends that would be associated with a regular purchase through a regulated broker.
How a Perpetual Future Differs From a Regular One
A classic future is an agreement to buy or sell an underlying asset in the future under predetermined conditions. It has an expiration date: by this time, the position is closed, rolled over to the next contract, or settled according to the platform’s rules. A perpetual future is different: there is no end date, so the trader can hold the position as long as there is enough margin and it is not closed manually or forcibly.
- Classic future: has an expiration date, price depends on the time to settlement, the cost of rolling over the position, and expectations for the underlying asset; funding is usually not used.
- Quarterly and other term futures: a type of classic contract with a predetermined month or quarter of expiration.
- Perpetual future: no expiration date, settlements are made through margin and position revaluation, and the price is kept close to the underlying market by the funding rate.
To keep the price of such an instrument close to the tracked market value, funding payments are made between traders. If demand shifts in one direction, the rate changes, and the mechanism pushes the contract price back toward the benchmark.
What Is Funding and Who Receives It
Funding, or the funding rate, is a regular payment between participants in the perpetual futures market. It is needed because the contract has no expiration: without a final settlement date, the price must be maintained through periodic payments.
If the perpetual future trades above the underlying market, usually holders of long positions pay, and holders of short positions receive. If the contract falls below the benchmark, the direction of payment may reverse: shorts pay, longs receive. Accrual occurs at times specified by the rules of the particular exchange and affects the final profitability of the trade.
The underlying asset in such a structure can be different: an index, commodity, currency, or stock. In market terms, a stock is finance, not a physical object: it is the right to a share in a company and participation in its economic result. But in a perpetual contract, the trader works not with the security itself but with its quote. In accounting terms, an asset on the balance sheet and trading exposure through a derivative are different things, and this distinction is important for understanding the product.
In practice, such instruments are primarily developed by crypto exchanges and on-chain platforms: Bitget, Coinbase, Binance, Trade XYZ on Hyperliquid. The base can be stocks, indexes, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and currencies. A perpetual future on the yuan in this logic is a contract on the change in the yuan’s exchange rate or a currency pair with the yuan; the trader works with the price, not by buying physical currency. For a Russian investor, it is important to distinguish this from regular exchange trading on the Moscow Exchange: there, the benchmarks remain local stocks, indexes, and currency instruments, while the perpetuals model described belongs to the crypto exchange infrastructure.
Stocks and Indexes Become Around-the-Clock
One notable example is the licensing of the S&P 500 index by S&P Dow Jones Indices for Trade XYZ, a platform operating on the Hyperliquid blockchain. This led to the launch of the first officially approved on-chain perpetual futures contract on the S&P 500. The instrument allows users outside the US to buy and sell exposure to the main US stock index without accessing a traditional stock exchange and without being tied to its schedule.
According to CoinGecko, from January 2025 to May 2026, cryptocurrency trading platforms added about 360 traditional financial assets for spot and perpetual trading. On average, each platform launched about 75 perpetual contracts on such assets versus 37 spot listings.
For the global market, the problem is not just that exchanges close in the evening. Investors need to be able to change their position when news breaks or risk changes. If the US market is closed but an event is already affecting expectations, the trader wants to act immediately, not wait for the session to open.
Ogi Ilag, investor at CMT Digital, believes that for institutional participants, the issue of access is not as acute: they already have brokers and over-the-counter platforms. The main value of perpetual contracts for them is less friction in hedging and risk management. A position can be adjusted or protected without waiting for the main exchange session to open.
For institutional investors, it’s not so much a question of access. They already have brokerage companies and over-the-counter trading platforms; the problem is friction, said Ogi Ilag.
For retail traders outside the US, the motivation may be different. In some countries, the stock market is concentrated around a small number of local issuers, and buying Tesla or getting exposure to the S&P 500 can be difficult. In Russia, the Moscow Exchange Index plays a similar role as a benchmark for the local stock market, and individual private investors are used to following Sberbank of Russia and Gazprom shares on the Moscow Exchange. But access to foreign indexes and stocks is arranged differently, and crypto exchanges are trying to close precisely this gap.
Pros, Cons, and Earnings on Perpetual Futures
The main advantage of perpetual futures is quick access to the asset price almost any time; the main disadvantage is that the trader does not get the asset itself but a risky derivative position with funding and possible liquidation.
- Speculation: the trader earns if they correctly guess the price direction, but if they are wrong, the loss grows quickly.
- Hedging: a position in a perpetual future helps protect the portfolio when the main market is closed or the trade is inconvenient to conduct through a broker.
- Arbitrage: participants compare the perpetual price with the underlying market and funding rate, trying to profit from the difference.
- Funding: it can add yield to the receiving side, but for the paying side, it becomes a regular cost of holding the position.
Deal liquidation is the forced closing of a position by the exchange when there is no longer enough margin to cover the risk. The higher the leverage and the stronger the move against the trader, the closer the liquidation price. The main risks include sharp market swings, accumulated funding payments, technical failures, lack of liquidity, and the rules of the particular platform.
Ogi Ilag puts it this way: for institutions, such products help reduce operational costs, and for retail clients, they provide real access to markets that were previously harder to reach. At the same time, he has not seen data that clearly shows how trading is split between these groups.
Despite rapid growth, perpetual contracts on stocks remain a small segment compared to the regular stock market. CoinGecko notes that the turnover of tokenized equity perpetuals is still less than 1% of the trading volume of underlying stock markets, although the segment itself grew from $831 million in July 2025 to $34 billion in May 2026.
One Account for Crypto, Stocks, and Derivatives
Around-the-clock trading is only part of a broader strategy. Coinbase and Binance are moving toward a model where a client can trade cryptocurrencies, stocks, and derivatives through a single account. Both companies describe this idea as the “Exchange of Everything” or a financial super app.
Coinbase is preparing to offer clients in the UK stocks and derivatives alongside cryptocurrencies. The company received authorization for investment services from the UK Financial Conduct Authority under rules based on the MiFID directive. This gives Coinbase the ability to offer retail clients traditional stocks and qualified institutional and experienced traders perpetual contracts on cryptocurrencies, stocks, and commodities.
Perpetual futures are one of the key areas that Coinbase wants to bring to market. We are really focused on becoming the “Exchange of Everything,” said Keith Grose, CEO of Coinbase UK.
According to Keith Grose, the long-term goal is to bring together spot crypto, perpetual futures, traditional stocks, and eventually tokenized versions of other assets in one place. Such a model could allow clients to use positions in different markets as collateral or borrow against existing stocks.
Binance is testing another element of this structure. For some wealthy clients, the platform allows tokenized stock positions to be used as collateral for other trades. Shunyet Zhang, head of trading market structure at Binance, gave an example with tokenized shares of Nvidia or SpaceX: a client can hold such a position on the exchange, and the platform counts it as collateral for trading another instrument, such as a crypto derivative.
You can really have a tokenized stock placed on our exchange, and we use it as collateral so you can trade something else. It could be a crypto derivative, said Shunyet Zhang.
Shunyet Zhang noted that Binance expanded a system that previously allowed the use of cryptocurrency as collateral and added traditional assets to it. According to him, the exchange reproduced in two weeks what the US market built over decades, but now this logic is applied to traditional financial assets.
Why Large Funds Are Still Cautious
Even with rapid product development, large funds are in no hurry to take on long-term risks associated with decentralized exchanges. Ogi Ilag believes that for institutional capital inflow, clear rules for custodial storage and clearing are needed, as well as protection comparable to the infrastructure of centralized clearing and custodial services.
He estimates this will take years. In the near term, he is skeptical about a significant inflow of funds into decentralized platforms. Hacker attacks and concerns about smart contract security remain a serious barrier.
What most people really want is not the ideology of decentralization, but a quality product like a perpetual on a traditional index, backed by a license and guarantees, said Ogi Ilag.
Therefore, in the near future, more institutional business may go to licensed centralized exchanges that settle through crypto infrastructure but provide clients with a familiar level of control and legal certainty.
Crypto exchanges still need several key elements to work with traditional products:
- Market data to correctly link the contract to the underlying asset.
- Licenses that allow work with traditional financial instruments.
- Banks through which the monetary infrastructure passes.
- Custodians responsible for asset storage.
- Market makers supporting liquidity and tight spreads.
This is especially important where different asset classes intersect: stock market, currency market, commodity instruments, and crypto derivatives. In each jurisdiction, including Russia, the role of the regulator, such as the Bank of Russia, shows how much access to financial products depends on rules, infrastructure, and risk control.
The main interest of users is clear: they want assets and convenient exposure to their price. But the long-term effect could be broader. If crypto exchanges can combine stocks, indexes, currencies, commodities, and cryptocurrencies in one account, not only will the set of available instruments change, but the very structure of the market itself.
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