Original Author: Prathik Desai
Compiled and Edited by: BitpushNews
Just when you think finance has become dull, it always manages to surprise. Lately, it seems everyone is reshaping the financial system in ways few anticipated, even those from the entertainment and media industries.
Take Jimmy Donaldson (aka "MrBeast" on YouTube), for example. Not only does he have a snack empire, but he recently acquired a banking app aimed at promoting financial literacy and money management among teens and young adults. Why? Perhaps nothing is more straightforward than monetizing a subscriber base of 466 million with financial products.
This summer, the CME Group, the world's largest derivatives market, will launch single-stock futures, allowing users to trade futures on over 50 top U.S. stocks, including Alphabet, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Meta.
These transformations show how people's ways of engaging with finance are changing. And nothing illustrates this better than the explosion of the Perpetual Markets over the past few years.
Perpetual futures (or Perps) are a type of financial derivative contract that allows market participants to speculate on asset prices without an expiration date. Perps also enable people to express views on assets quickly and cheaply. They are more captivating than traditional markets because they offer instant access and leverage. Unlike traditional markets, they don't require broker onboarding processes, jurisdictional paperwork, or adherence to "traditional" market hours.
Furthermore, on-chain perpetual markets allow any asset (whether traditional or crypto) to be traded in a permissionless, highly leveraged manner. This makes speculation fun, especially when humans can't resist betting on the trajectory of volatile assets outside traditional trading hours. This enables risk to be priced in real-time.
Consider what happened two weeks ago. When traditional and crypto markets crashed simultaneously, traders flocked to Hyperliquid, driving perpetual gold and silver trading into a frenzy. On January 31st, Hyperliquid alone accounted for 2% of the global daily trading volume in its Silver perpetual market, which had been live for less than a month.
This explains why dashboards of perpetual contract trading volume are increasingly dominating crypto communities and forums. Volume is an absolute value. It looks large, refreshes every few minutes, and is perfect for leaderboards. But it misses a key nuance: volume might reflect movement that lacks meaning. A market with high volume might have depth, but it could also be due to rewards and incentives encouraging higher-frequency activity. This activity is often recursive and not very meaningful.
This week, I delved into other metrics of the perpetual trading market. When used alongside trading volume, these metrics add more dimensions and tell a completely different story from volume alone.
Let's begin.
A Few Data Points
The user-friendly interface of perpetual markets makes them a low-barrier, default platform for expressing views across various markets and global assets. The wide selection of highly leveraged derivative trading on both traditional and crypto assets on a single platform has led to perpetual contract volumes surpassing spot trading volumes on decentralized exchanges. From 44% in February 2025, the share of perpetual contract volume has surged to about 75% today (relative to spot volume).
This growth has been particularly significant in the past few months:
- The cumulative total perpetual trading volume across all platforms over the four years ending July 31, 2025, was $6.91 trillion.
- In just the past six months, this volume has doubled, reaching $14 trillion.
All this growth occurred against the backdrop of the total crypto market capitalization shrinking by nearly 40% between August 1, 2025, and February 9, 2026. This activity indicates that traders are increasingly leaning towards derivative trading, hedging, and short-term positioning, especially when spot markets become highly volatile and bearish.
But there's a catch. With such massive activity, it's easy to misread volume metrics. Especially because perpetual trading isn't just about buying and holding assets long-term; it involves repeatedly adjusting bet sizes using leverage over shorter timeframes.
Therefore, when market turnover accelerates rapidly, a question inevitably arises: Do record-breaking volumes reflect more capital inflow, or the same capital cycling faster?
This is where observing Open Interest (OI) becomes meaningful. If volume reflects capital flow, then OI measures outstanding risk exposure. On perpetual exchanges, OI refers to the total dollar value of active, unsettled long and short contracts held by traders.
If perpetual trading is being adopted by the mass market, we would hope to see not just larger capital flows but also proportionally growing open interest.
- Last February, OI averaged around $4 billion;
- Now, that number has more than tripled to about $13 billion. In fact, the average for the entire January was about $18 billion before dropping roughly 30% in the first week of February.
While perpetual trading volume doubled in the past five months, OI grew by about 50% (from $13B to ~$18B, then back to $13B). To better understand this, I looked at the capital efficiency (the percentage of OI relative to daily volume) over the past year.
The OI/Volume ratio jumped 50% from last year's 0.33x to 0.49x today. But this progress wasn't smooth; the 50-basis-point increase in this ratio went through multiple peaks and troughs:
Phase 1 (Feb - May 2025): The Quiet Period. The OI/Volume ratio averaged ~0.46x, with average OI of ~$4.8B and average daily volume of ~$11.5B.
Phase 2 (June - Mid-Oct): The Leap. The ratio averaged ~0.72x. During this period, average OI rose to $14.8B, and average daily volume was $23B. This marked not only record-high volumes but also increased risk exposure and greater capital commitment to these derivatives.
Phase 3: Market Reversal. This phase began with the massive liquidation on October 10th, which wiped out over $19B in leveraged positions within 24 hours. From mid-October to late December, the OI/Volume ratio fell to ~0.38x, driven primarily by volume growth while open interest largely stagnated. October, November, and December saw the three highest monthly volumes of 2025, averaging over $1.2 trillion per month. During the same period, OI averaged around $15B, slightly below the previous three-month average.
Protocol Level
Here, I want to add more dimensions at the protocol level for perpetual markets. This helps us understand how efficiently perpetual exchanges convert trading activity into "sticky capital" and revenue.
As of February 10th, here's how the top five perpetual exchanges by 24-hour volume performed:
Hyperliquid: Its ratio of OI to 7-day average daily volume is over 45%, able to convert a significant share of volume into lasting positions. This suggests that for every $10 traded on the platform, $4.50 is invested in active positions. This is important because a high OI ratio leads to tighter spreads, deeper liquidity, and confidence in scaling trades without slippage.
Hyperliquid's fee revenue reinforces this story. Its take rate is about 3.2 basis points, converting the largest share of 24-hour volume into fee income.
Aster: Currently ranked second, it maintains a decent capital efficiency (OI/Vol) of 34%, despite having almost half the volume of Hyperliquid. However, its monetization is noteworthy – with a lower take rate (~1.6 bps), Aster clearly prioritizes capital retention on its platform over fee maximization.
edgeX and Lighter: Both perform similarly on the capital efficiency ladder, with an OI/Vol of 21%. However, edgeX's fee monetization is comparable to Hyperliquid's at 2.8 bps.
Summary
Remarkably, the perpetual contract market today is no longer a simple growth story; it requires a nuanced reading of multiple metrics. At the macro level, volume is exploding: the growth in cumulative perpetual volume over six months exceeded the total of the previous four years. But the picture only becomes clear when OI is read alongside volume.
A clearer victory lies in the growth of the OI/Volume ratio. This is a direct signal that "patient capital" is willing to trust and bet on the variety of products and markets emerging in perpetual trading exchanges.
What's more worth watching in the future is how individual players evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, exchanges that can optimize "trading conviction" and achieve sustainable monetization will be far more important than those that merely rely on rewards and incentives to dominate volume leaderboards.
