About two years ago, Wall Street began bringing crypto into traditional finance (tradfi), through exchange-traded funds (ETFs), custody, funds and other regulated products. Crypto exchanges are now moving in the other direction, bringing stocks, indexes and commodities onto their platforms through perpetual futures or PERPS.
Crypto exchanges processed $1.32 trillion in perpetual futures tied to traditional assets during the first five months of 2026, compared with $104.21 billion in all of 2025, according to CoinGecko. Monthly volume rose from $230 million in January 2025 to $347.17 billion in May 2026.
Bitget said the growth has changed the makeup of its business.
“A year ago, we didn't even have a perpetual stock product; 100% of our volume came from crypto,” said Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget in an interview with CoinDesk. “A year later, we now have about 28% of our total trading volume coming from the stock business, and those are mainly stock perpetuals.”
Shunyet Jan, an executive overseeing trading market structure at Binance, said traditional exchanges are now adopting products and trading hours first used by crypto platforms.
"The innovation of perps started in the crypto world," Jan said. "But then it could also migrate over to TradFi."
The move is what some market executives have called the “reverse bridge.” Instead of tradfi providing access to crypto, crypto exchanges are offering access to Wall Street markets.
In most cases, the shares themselves are not moving onto crypto exchanges. Stock perps are contracts tied to share prices. They generally do not provide ownership, voting rights or the protections that come with buying shares through a regulated broker. But crypto exchanges are finding demand for contracts that provide exposure to those prices 24/7 without needing to own the actual shares.
One example of this phenomenon was when S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed its S&P 500 benchmark to Trade XYZ, a platform operating natively on the Hyperliquid blockchain. The partnership produced the first officially approved onchain S&P 500 perpetual futures contract, allowing non-U.S. individuals to buy and sell the American equity benchmark 24/7.
Crypto trading platforms have listed about 360 tradfi assets across spot and perps between January 2025 and May 2026, according to the CoinGecko report. The platforms included in the report averaged roughly 75 traditional-asset perps listings each, compared to only 37 spot listings.
Unlike traditional futures, perps on whether an asset’s price will rise or fall are without an expiration date. Payments between traders, known as funding rates, help maintain the perp contract close to the price of the asset it tracks.
For international trading desks, the issue with the traditional stock exchanges’ hours of operations goes beyond opening hours.
Source
This article is syndicated for educational reading. For the latest updates, visit the original publisher.
Read on coindesk.com
