Original author: Prathik Desai
Compiled and edited by: BitpushNews
Just when you think finance is getting boring, it always manages to surprise you. Lately, it seems everyone is reshaping the financial system in ways few could have predicted, even those from the entertainment and media industries.
Take Jimmy Donaldson (known as "MrBeast" on YouTube) as an example. He not only owns a snack empire, but recently acquired a banking app aimed at educating teenagers and young adults about financial literacy and money management. Why? Perhaps nothing is more direct than monetizing his 466 million subscriber base through financial products.
This summer, CME Group, the world's largest derivatives trading market, will launch individual stock futures, allowing users to trade futures on more than 50 top U.S. stocks, including Alphabet, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Meta.
These restructurings demonstrate the changing ways people participate in finance. And nothing illustrates this better than the explosion of the perpetual market in recent years.
Perpetual futures (or Perps) are financial derivative contracts that allow market participants to speculate on asset prices without an expiration date. Perps also allow people to express their opinions on assets quickly and cheaply. They are more attractive than traditional markets because they offer instant access and leverage. Unlike traditional markets, they do not require broker onboarding processes, there is no jurisdictional paperwork, and they do not follow "traditional" market hours.
Furthermore, on-chain perpetual markets allow any asset (whether traditional or crypto) to be traded in a permissionless, high-leverage manner. This makes speculation interesting, especially when humans are irresistible to the temptation to gamble on the trajectory of volatile assets outside of traditional trading hours. This enables risk to be priced in real time.
Consider what happened two weeks ago. When both traditional and crypto markets crashed simultaneously, traders flocked to Hyperliquid, fueling a frenzy in perpetual gold and silver trading. On January 31, Hyperliquid alone accounted for 2% of global daily silver trading volume in its silver perpetual contract market, which had been online for less than a month.
This explains why perpetual contract trading volume dashboards are increasingly dominating the crypto community and forums. Trading volume is an absolute value. It looks large, refreshes every few minutes, and is perfect for leaderboards. But it misses a crucial nuance: trading volume can reflect a meaningless movement. A market with high trading volume could be due to sufficient depth, but it could also be due to rewards and incentives encouraging more frequent activity. This activity is often recursive and largely meaningless.
This week, I delved into other metrics for the perpetual trading market. When used in conjunction with trading volume, these metrics add more dimensions and tell a completely different story than volume alone.
Let's begin.
Several data points
The user-friendly interface of perpetual markets makes them a low-barrier, default interface for expressing opinions across various markets and global assets. The wide availability of highly leveraged derivatives trading in traditional and crypto assets on a single platform has led to perpetual contract trading volume surpassing spot trading volume on decentralized exchanges. From 44% in February 2025, the trading volume share of perpetual contracts has surged to approximately 75% today (relative to spot trading volume).
This growth has been particularly noticeable in the past few months:
- Over the four years ending July 31, 2025, the total perpetual transaction volume across the platform reached US$6.91 trillion.
- In the past six months alone, the transaction volume has doubled to $14 trillion.
All of this growth occurred against the backdrop of a nearly 40% contraction in the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies between August 1, 2025, and February 9, 2026. This activity suggests that traders are increasingly inclined towards derivatives trading, hedging, and short-term positioning, especially when the spot market becomes highly volatile and bearish.
However, there is a pitfall here. In such a large-scale activity, it is easy to misinterpret trading volume metrics. This is especially true because perpetual trading involves more than just buying assets and holding them long-term; it also involves repeatedly adjusting the size of bets using leverage within a shorter timeframe.
Therefore, when market turnover increases rapidly, a question inevitably comes to mind: Does the record trading volume reflect more capital inflow, or is the same capital circulating at a faster rate?
This is the significance of observing Open Interest (OI). If trading volume reflects capital flows, then OI measures open interest. On perpetual exchanges, OI refers to the total dollar value of active, unsettled long and short contracts held by traders.
If perpetual trading becomes accepted by the mass market, we would like to see not only larger capital flows, but also a proportional increase in open interest.
- Last February, OI averaged approximately $4 billion;
- That figure has now more than tripled to approximately $13 billion. In fact, the average for the entire month of January was around $18 billion, before dropping by about 30% in the first week of February.
While perpetual trading volume has doubled in the past five months, OI has grown by about 50% (from $13 billion to about $18 billion, before falling back to $13 billion). To better understand this, I looked at the trend of capital efficiency (i.e., OI as a percentage of daily trading volume) over the past year.
The OI/volume ratio jumped 50% from 0.33x last year to 0.49x today. However, this progress wasn't without its challenges, experiencing several peaks and troughs during this 50-basis-point increase.
Phase 1 (February-May 2025): Quiet Period. The average OI/Trading Volume ratio is approximately 0.46x, the average OI is approximately $4.8 billion, and the average daily trading volume is approximately $11.5 billion.
Phase Two (June to mid-October): The Leap Forward. The ratio averaged approximately 0.72x. During this period, average open interest (OI) rose to $14.8 billion, with daily trading volume averaging $23 billion. This not only marked a record high in trading volume but also signified increased risk exposure and greater capital investment in these derivatives.
Phase Three: Market Reversal. This phase began with the massive liquidation on October 10th, wiping out over $19 billion in leveraged positions within 24 hours. From mid-October to late December, the OI/volume ratio dropped to ~0.38x, primarily driven by increased trading volume, while open interest essentially stagnated. October, November, and December saw the highest three-month trading volumes of 2025, averaging over $1.2 trillion per month. During the same period, OI averaged approximately $15 billion, slightly below the average of the previous three months.
Agreement level
Here, I want to add more dimensions to the perpetual market at the protocol level. This will help us understand how efficiently perpetual exchanges can transform trading activity into "sticky capital" and revenue.
As of February 10th, the following are the top five perpetual exchanges by 24-hour trading volume:
Hyperliquid: Its OI (On-the-Book) ratio exceeds 45% of its 7-day average daily trading volume, enabling it to convert a significant portion of trading volume into persistent positions. This means that for every $10 traded on the platform, $4.50 is invested in active positions. This is significant because a high OI ratio leads to narrower spreads, deeper liquidity, and the confidence to scale trades without slippage.
Hyperliquid's fee revenue reinforces this story. Its take rate of approximately 3.2 basis points is converting the largest share of 24-hour trading volume into fee revenue.
Aster: Currently ranked second, it boasts a respectable capital efficiency (OI/Vol) of 34%, despite having almost half the trading volume of Hyperliquid. However, its monetization capabilities are noteworthy – with a low monetization rate (approximately 1.6 bps), Aster clearly prioritizes capital retention on its platform over maximizing transaction fees.
edgeX and Lighter: Both perform similarly on the capital efficiency ladder, with an OI/Vol of 21%. However, edgeX is comparable to Hyperliquid in terms of transaction fee monetization, at 2.8 bps.
Summarize
Notably, the perpetual contract market today is no longer a simple growth story; it requires a nuanced interpretation of multiple metrics. At the macro level, trading volume has exploded: the cumulative growth in perpetual trading volume within six months has exceeded the total of the previous four years. However, the picture only becomes clear when OI (Online Index) and trading volume are considered together.
A more definitive victory lies in the growth of the OI/trading volume ratio. This is a direct signal that "patient capital" is willing to trust and bet on the various products and markets emerging in perpetual exchanges.
Looking ahead, it's more important to see how individual players evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, exchanges that can optimize "conviction" and achieve sustainable monetization will be far more important than platforms that merely rely on rewards and incentives to dominate the trading volume rankings.
