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.
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."
Perpetual futures are a crypto-native derivative without an expiration date. They let traders mirror an asset's price without taking possession of it, run 24 hours a day, and use periodic funding payments between longs and shorts to keep prices aligned with the markets they track. The format has long been central to crypto trading and now sits at the center of this crossover trade.
The momentum may soon meet stricter rulebooks in the US. This week, Coinbase Global Inc. submitted a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking to bring perpetual stock contracts to American customers.
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Crypto exchanges are broadening into equities and commodities while traditional finance borrows crypto's 24/7 market style. The upshot is scale: traders are increasingly placing leveraged wagers on conventional assets through crypto platforms without owning the underlying, shifting a niche activity late last year into a meaningful slice of business. If you watch both worlds, expect more overlap, more products and, potentially, more volatility shaping prices on your screen at any hour.
