Movers in This Issue
| Kraken | In this report for the first time, showing notable growth on its xStocks tokenized equity and ETF perps. |
| Bitget & Lighter | Adding index perps on major US stock indexes. |
| Hyperliquid | Recovering handsomely from an 11% dip in volume last week. |
Equity perps summer begins with a handful of new index perps:
Bitget rolled out an S&P 500 proxy and is not bothering to hide, naming it "SP500," despite Trade[XYZ] having the official pair with S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Lighter was more circumspect about IP, launching proxies on the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100, tickered US500 and US100, respectively—alongside a new HN100 index perp on GPU prices.
These moves follow XYZ's early success with index perps, first launching a Nasdaq proxy contract called XYZ100, followed by their official SPX contract, announced in March. However, these are no longer the top contracts by volume, after commodities. They've been supplanted by single-stock equity perps on Binance, two weeks in a row.
The volume for now is mostly in blue-chip AI trade stocks, but the excitement is all in pre-IPO: Five exchanges this week listed SpaceX, and you may notice something odd about pricing. Lighter and OKX were first, pricing SpaceX shares around $2,500; the other five come in around $200. It's no mystery: the first two had contracts up before SpaceX announced a 5:1 stock split. They’re still using an assumed base of 1 billion shares, while the others have the official number, 11.87 billion. All seven average to an implied valuation of $2.47T in the last hourly close in our weekly pull, with prices diverging no more than 52 bps below or 85 bps above that number.
All this pre-IPO activity may have some bearing on the heated debate that opened up this week on perps market infrastructure, specifically central-limit order book (CLOB) vs request for quote (RFQ). CLOBs like Hyperliquid have been, well, clobbering RFQ exchanges like Ostium on volume. But suddenly, RFQ DEX Variational raised $50M, led by Dragonfly. And, US regulators have been continuing to send positive signals about perps and tokenized stocks. Now, some are thinking maybe RFQs built atop primary, regulated derivatives venues will win.
CLOBs have led the early growth of RWA perps. They’re now pushing the frontier further, into new markets in pre-IPO and 24/7 trading, where traditional venues don’t compete. The question is: will established, regulated venues fast-follow? Intercontinental Exchange’s partnership with OKX, announced Friday, shows these venues are at least keeping a close eye on RWA perps. Will they ultimately cede expansion territory like weekend and pre-IPO trading to other order books? I wouldn’t necessarily bet the farm that they do.
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Tweet of the Week
Not much to be said about this post from the former Monad head of DeFi, except that this is the world we’re already in.
Weekly Volume by Category
Equity perps slowed their relentless growth as a share of perpetual futures volume. 25% could be a new normal. Note: Some readers may notice a difference in this chart versus the one we published in last week’s issue of Perps Weekly. We have decided going forward to exclude MEXC, due to concerns about the reliability of their data.
Top Assets by Volume
CRCL, perennially on this chart as a crypto bellwether, bubbled under at No. 12 with $1.16B in weekly volume, ceding all the top 10 equity rankings to AI trade favorites. SPACEX ranked 17th with $542M. EWY still ranks the largest ETF, at No. 15 overall with $708M.
Top Assets by Growth
With Kraken data in the database for the first time, ETF and equity perps on xStocks tokenized assets hit the leaderboard for fastest-growing assets, week over week. Disney bubbled under at No. 11, growing 128% week over week, with its largest market on Binance.
New Listings
With exchanges adding new RWA perps rapidly, this table got too unwieldy to track all of them. From now on, we're only including net new listings, i.e., not seen before in the Perps Weekly database. Couple others worth noting though: Binance added SPACEX on May 21 & CBRS on May 19, and reported $36.9M and $22.7M in average daily volume, respectively, despite not being first.
Fastest-Growing Exchanges
New setup for this chart so it tracks which exchanges are growing, week over week. This should make for a more dynamic visualization of who's moving in the market. This week's growth is dominated by smaller DEXs, but Hyperliquid gained 22.3%, bubbling under at No. 6, recovering—and then some—the 11% dip in volume we tracked last week.
Notes
This issue covers the week ending May 24 at 11:59pm UTC, and draws on hourly candle data from Aster, Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Coinbase International, Dreamcash and Trade[XYZ] on Hyperliquid, EdgeX, Grvt, Kraken, Lighter, Orderly, and OKX.
If you have questions about methodology or other data you’re seeking, please get in touch: [email protected].