Long-tail assets on perp
Summary
It's time for us to move to the next chapter. Today we're announcing our focus on launching long-tail assets on perpetual markets, and the ecosystem fund that will support them.
Over the past few years, perps have broken out of crypto's echo chamber. Perpetual, high-leverage, 24/7 markets aren't an incremental improvement on the existing financial system. They're a step function. And their reach already extends well beyond crypto, across both DEXs and CEXs, into equities and commodities. However, while the market has grown, the range of assets traded on it has not kept pace. There are still countless niche assets in the world that deserve price discovery and don't have it. We call these long-tail perp assets.
What we do is partner with asset owners to launch new long-tail perp assets, and use the ecosystem fund to help deepen liquidity for them.
Where perps stand today
As everyone knows by now, perps are already the main arena of crypto.
The spot-versus-perp split makes the structure even clearer. On Binance's BTC/USDT, perp volume has averaged roughly 6:1 against spot since perps launched in September 2019. That means about 83.5% of all BTC trading is perp volume (source: TradingView / CCN, October 2025). On major pairs, it's not unusual to see that climb past 90%.
Liquidity gathers where leverage is available, capital efficiency is high, and shorting is easy. That's structural, not accidental.
The same force applies to assets arriving from outside crypto. Which is why the interesting part of bringing equities and commodities on-chain is not the spot token itself.
Tokenizing spot is the work of copying an existing equity market onto a blockchain. Nothing about that copy guarantees liquidity shows up on the other side. What's interesting is everything that grows around it: perp open interest, funding, basis, and markets that never existed before. What's worth building is what the existing market structure fundamentally cannot offer — 24/7 execution, a real short side, and exposure to risks that have no market at all.
What's missing isn't more exchanges
All that growth brought a flood of new perp exchanges. But the liquidity sits in very few places.
On CEXs, Binance holds 33% and OKX 15% going into 2026.
On-chain, Hyperliquid alone holds about 70% of the perp DEX market (roughly $432 billion in volume in March 2026).
The perp exchange layer is already settling into an oligopoly. Stacking a 13th or 14th general-purpose perp exchange on top of it creates almost no marginal value.
What's missing isn't exchanges. It's assets.
The shift toward new assets has already begun
The signs are clear. Tokenized equities and commodities already have real presence on Hyperliquid and on CEXs.
But tokenizing something is easy. Creating a market for it is not. Adding a ticker and building a market are completely different jobs.
To make a perp market on a new asset work, someone has to find the asset, design the price feed, set the contract spec, pick the venue, and build up liquidity by bringing in market makers and traders. Miss any one of those and the book stays thin forever. The real bottleneck isn't tokenization. It isn't technology. It isn't even capital. It's that nobody takes the whole job end to end.
That's the gap we're stepping into.
Why We're Focused on Long-Tail Assets on Perp
Major assets already have deep spot markets behind them. AAPL is priced on NASDAQ. Oil is priced on NYMEX. It will take time before a crypto exchange becomes the main arena for price discovery on those. The 24/7 advantage is real, but for now it mostly makes crypto venues a place to hedge outside market hours.
Long-tail assets have no deep spot market to begin with.
Liquidity is fragmented and pricing is opaque
There's no way to short, or shorting is prohibitively expensive
Trading hours are limited, or no market exists at all
For assets like these, the moment a crypto exchange becomes the main arena for price discovery arrives quickly. There's no deep incumbent market to compete with. You're not taking price discovery from anyone. You're creating it.
The worse existing markets are at price discovery, the more valuable a perp becomes.
Perps move spot, and new layers grow around them
Most equity markets in the world are illiquid. You simply can't put size into them. The same is true of Japanese small caps, emerging market indices, and private company valuations. The list of assets you'd like to buy but can't is enormous.
But once open interest builds on an on-chain perp, the causality flips. When leverage, long/short, funding and hedging demand form on-chain first, the perp market starts driving the pricing of the underlying.
This becomes a self-reinforcing loop.
A perp launches and a venue for price discovery exists
Hedging and shorting become possible, so larger players can take size
Liquidity deepens and spreads tighten
More flow arrives and price discovery gets sharper
The perp price starts setting the price of the underlying
What matters is that once this sequence works, it repeats regardless of the asset. Perp-led market creation will spread from here.
Ecosystem Fund
We work with asset partners to launch long-tail assets whose price discovery will happen with crypto markets as the main arena, and we commit our own capital to getting those markets off the ground.
The range of assets is likely to be wide.
Compute: GPU rental rates, electricity prices, datacenter capacity
Niche physical commodities: agricultural goods, metals
Collectibles and IP: trading cards, watches, wine
Illiquid regional equity markets and emerging market indices
We'll share more on how the Ecosystem Fund connects to our token, along with further details, in the updates ahead.