TradFi perps volume surges 117-fold to $387B in 18 months as crypto exchanges eat Wall Street's lunch

Eighteen months ago, trading traditional financial assets on crypto exchanges was a rounding error. Monthly volume sat at $3.32 billion in January 2025, a figure so small it barely registered against the trillions sloshing through conventional markets.

Fast forward to June 2026, and that number has ballooned to $387.39 billion. That’s a 117-fold increase.

The numbers behind the explosion

A CoinGecko report covering July 2026 lays out the scale of this shift across six major centralized exchanges. Total TradFi trading volume on those platforms hit $393.15 billion in June 2026, up from $3.46 billion at the start of 2025. Perpetual futures contracts accounted for 98.5% of that June figure, meaning spot trading of traditional assets on crypto platforms is almost irrelevant by comparison.

The acceleration in 2026 has been particularly sharp. Cumulative TradFi perps volume surpassed $1.32 trillion during just the first five months of the year. For context, all of 2025 produced $104.21 billion in cumulative volume. So five months of 2026 generated roughly 12.7 times the entire previous year.

Open interest climbed from $60 million on January 1, 2025, to a peak of $4.67 billion by the end of June 2026.