Crypto Exchanges' New Crush: Perps Linked to Stocks, Indexes and Commodities

What the new data shows

Non-crypto markets are fast becoming a big deal on crypto venues. Fasanara Digital tallied that assets like stocks, indexes and commodities accounted for 23.48% of perpetual-futures activity on leading digital-asset exchanges in August, up from just 0.5% in November. As noted by Nikita Fadeev, who serves as the managing partner for Fasanara Digital, August monthly turnover in these contracts reached $778 billion, rising from $23.5 billion and representing roughly a 33x jump versus November. Fasanara Digital is a London-based crypto-focused hedge fund within asset manager Fasanara Capital.

Why traders are moving in

The pitch is simple: trade any hour, use leverage, and tap into sharper moves in certain stocks while some corners of crypto have quieted down. Earlier this year, markets running on Hyperliquid, including Trade.xyz, rolled out a wave of non-crypto perpetuals covering silver, oil and pre-IPO names. As one investor put it, "A lot of people have switched their attention to the traditional markets. They used to trade crypto like memecoins but then the volatility of some stocks is multiple times higher than Bitcoin," said Fadeev. "Here you can also trade these kinds of assets that have seen really good tailwinds with much more leverage."