Equity Perps Flippening, Blind Pre-IPO Surge? 🌊

Equity perps have flipped commodities, after adding $15.5B in volume to hit $34.2B this week, reaching 46% of total RWA perps volume. With that, June is heading toward a new ATH in monthly RWA perps volume, mostly on the strength of AI-adjacent stocks: Marvell (MRVL), Micron (MU) and Fluence (FLNC).

The pre-IPO perps trade is also contributing, with weekly SpaceX perps volume reaching $1.2B, despite a mixed record on pre-IPO price discovery. The pre-IPO perp for Quantinuum (QNT) got bid up to around $100, before it began to falter at around 6am ET on the Quantinuum IPO day, falling to $68 by the time trading opened on the Nasdaq, that afternoon. The S-1 price of $54—boosted on the Monday before the IPO—was closer to the market than the frothy pre-IPO perp, by a factor of 2.

These markets are thin. SpaceX is the deepest pre-IPO market yet, with $2.3B in total volume through today. The Cerebras perp’s price discovery is remarkable with only $213.6M in volume trading up to its IPO at 1pm May 14. QNT was less than half that, with $82M. Stork CEO & Founder Meredith Pitkoff will be presenting some of this analysis and other insights on what makes RWA perps tick, at EthConf today at 3pm. Stop by the breakout stage and say hi. 

In fact, stop what you’re working on altogether and think about your friendships. Be a good friend and forward Perps Weekly to someone else building or trading in perps. If you got this email from a friend, think about the value of that relationship and sign up here to get it every Monday.

This didn’t happen, but it’s what we’re all building for. Tweet of the week goes to Relayer Capital’s Austin Barack. Watching the skies, hoping SpaceX perps stick the landing.

RWA perps are above $70B a week for the first time since the week of March 3 on the list of exchanges we’re currently tracking (having dropped MEXC a couple weeks ago). Equity perps flipping commodities is the culmination of a cyclical narrative that has been building around the AI trade—but it could be a secular maturing of RWA perps markets to more closely match traditional derivs market structure. ETF perps’ volume nearly doubled to $4.9B, now 6.6% of the market.

Gold and WTI crude oil are still the top markets in RWA perps, but not by nearly so wide a margin as they once were. Micron (MU) flipping silver and Marvell (MRVL) and Sandisk (SNDK) flipping Brent crude is most of the story, as the blue chips of the AI-adjacent trade keep growing in RWA perps volume. The Hyperliquid index perps on Trade[XYZ] held their place in the top 10 assets, both growing in volume week over week as well.

The top assets by volume growth tell a tale of attention scattered across Asia stocks (Hyundai and Samsung), pre-IPO stocks (Anthropic and Quantinuum), AI pivots (Nokia), AI energy (Fluence), known AI-adjacent contenders (Marvell, Applied Materials, Broadcom) and quantum computing (IBM).

When we started this newsletter, we had to disambiguate perps on the crypto BounceBit (BB): they were obviously not Blackberry; who would list Blackberry perps? Then Blackberry pivoted to AI, so, naturally it did $14.9M in average daily volume across five equity perps venues in its first week. Other notables: Lighter added RoboStrategy (BOT), a closed-end fund investing in robotics and AI with a leadership team stacked with crypto veterans. Those two trends ran through other new listings, with two commercial drone cos (EVEX and EH) and several robotics and drone related defense cos, including Red Cat Holdings (RCAT), a 1984-founded company that has been moving with this trade. Smaller in starting volume, but notable for RWA perps’ global market access thesis: Bitget listed four Tokyo stocks and two Seoul stocks this week.

Coinbase is the fastest-growing RWA perps exchange, once again, almost recovering their May 11 volume high of $976M with strong AI-adjacent trade in ARM. AI-adjacent Marvell was the top growth engine for Binance, Hyperliquid, and OKX—but Hyperliquid was also strong in (mostly) pre-IPO Quantinuum and South Korean stocks. AI-adjacent Lumentum Holdings (LITE) led the week’s growth for Bitget, along with the Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X ETF (SOXL). In exchanges not seen here, Variational just launched RWA perps and hired DeFi analyst Hansolar as APAC head of growth; and Ondo Perps is set to go live this week.

This issue covers the week ending June 7, and draws on volume data from Aster, Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Coinbase International, Crypto.com, Dreamcash and Trade[XYZ] on Hyperliquid, EdgeX, Grvt, Kraken, Lighter, OKX, and Orderly.

If you have questions about methodology or other data you’re seeking, please get in touch: [email protected].