How perpetual futures took off (and where they're going)

Perpetual futures (“perps”) are futures contracts that never expire. Once a crypto-native hack, they took off onchain in 2025. They’ve become one of crypto’s biggest markets, covering traditional assets and trillions of dollars in trading volume. 

Last year, the top centralized exchanges cleared $86.2T in perp volume (+47% YoY), while onchain perpetuals grew even faster: Leading decentralized exchanges reached $6.7T (+346% YoY). DEX volume now represents roughly 7.8% of CEX volume, up from about 2.5% just a year earlier. [Note: while a small number of U.S.-regulated centralized platforms offer products similar to perpetual futures contracts to U.S. persons, all centralized and decentralized exchanges restrict U.S. persons’ access to true perpetual futures contracts.]

But the bigger story here is that perps are starting to look less like a fringe crypto primitive, and more like a fundamental shift in trading behaviors and market structure.  

So what is driving perps’s popularity? And why now? This post looks at why perps are increasingly embraced by traders globally, the scale of the market opportunity, and where builders see opportunity.

A brief history and evolution of perps

The idea itself is actually older than the crypto industry. Perps have existed in theory since 1993, when Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller introduced the perpetual futures contract, which he originally envisioned as a tool for hedging property-value risks. But perps weren’t popularized in crypto until 2016 with the rise of BitMEX and XBTUSD, the longest-running bitcoin perpetual swap.