Author: Prathik Desai
Original Title: Reading Perps Beyond Volume
Compiled and Edited by: BitpushNews
Just when you think finance is getting boring, it always has a way of surprising you. Lately, it seems like everyone is restructuring the financial system in ways few foresaw, even those from the entertainment and media industries.
Take Jimmy Donaldson (aka "MrBeast" on YouTube) for example. He not only has a snack empire but also acquired a banking app recently, aiming to promote financial literacy and money management among teenagers and young adults. Why? Perhaps nothing is more direct than monetizing his 466 million subscriber base with financial products.
This summer, the CME Group, the world's largest derivatives exchange, will launch single-stock futures, allowing users to trade futures on over 50 top U.S. stocks including Alphabet, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Meta.
These restructurings show us how people's ways of engaging with finance are changing. And nothing illustrates this better than the explosion of the Perpetual Markets (Perps) market over the past few years.
Perpetual Futures (or Perps) are a type of financial derivative contract that allows market participants to speculate on the price of an asset without an expiration date. Perps also allow 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 follow "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博弈 the trajectory of volatile assets outside traditional trading hours. This allows risk to be priced in real-time.
Think about 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 contract 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's high volume could be due to 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 in conjunction with volume, these metrics add more dimensions and tell a completely different story than volume alone.
Let's begin.
A Few Data Points
The user-friendly interface of perpetual markets makes them a low-barrier, default interface 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 soared to around 75% today (relative to spot volume).
This growth has been particularly pronounced in the past few months:
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As of July 31, 2025, the four-year cumulative perpetual trading volume across all platforms was $6.91 trillion.
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In just the past six months, this volume has doubled, reaching $14 trillion.
All this growth occurred against the backdrop of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization shrinking by nearly 40% between August 1, 2025, and February 9, 2026. This activity suggests 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 time frames.
So, when market turnover speeds up, a question inevitably arises: Do record-breaking volumes reflect more capital flowing in, 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 only larger capital flows but also proportionally growing outstanding exposure.
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Last February, OI averaged around $4 billion;
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Now that number has more than tripled, to around $13 billion. In fact, the average for the entire month of January was around $18 billion before dropping about 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 trend of Capital Efficiency (i.e., OI as a percentage of daily volume) over the past year.
The OI/Volume ratio jumped 50% from 0.33x last year to 0.49x today. But this progress wasn't smooth; the 50 basis point growth in this ratio went through multiple peaks and troughs:
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Phase 1 (Feb-May 2025): Dormancy. The OI/Volume ratio averaged ~0.46x, with average OI of ~$4.8B and average daily volume of ~$11.5B.
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Phase 2 (June - Mid-Oct): 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 volume but also increased risk exposure and greater capital commitment to these derivatives.
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Phase 3: Market Reversal. This phase began around 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 highest three-month trading volumes of 2025, averaging over $1.2 trillion per month. Over 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 5 perpetual exchanges by 24-hour volume performed:
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Hyperliquid: Its OI to 7-day average daily volume ratio exceeds 45%, able to convert a large share of volume into lasting positions. This indicates that for every $10 traded on the platform, $4.5 is投入 (invested) in active positions. This is important because high OI rates lead to narrower spreads, deeper liquidity, and confidence in scaling trades without slippage.
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Hyperliquid's fee revenue reinforces this story. Its Take Rate is ~3.2 basis points (bps), converting the largest share of 24-hour volume into fee income.
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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 capability is notable – with a lower take rate (~1.6 bps), Aster clearly prioritizes capital retention on its platform over fee revenue maximization.
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edgeX & Lighter: Both perform similarly on the capital efficiency ladder, with OI/Vol at 21%. However, edgeX's fee monetization is comparable to Hyperliquid's at 2.8 bps.
Summary
It's remarkable that 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 has exploded: the growth in cumulative perpetual trading volume in six months exceeded the total of the previous four years. But the picture only becomes clear when OI and volume are read together.
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 various products and markets emerging on perpetual trading exchanges.
What's even more值得关注 (worth watching) in the future is how individual players will evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, exchanges that can optimize for "Conviction" and achieve sustainable monetization will be far more important than those that merely rely on rewards and incentives to dominate volume leaderboards.
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