rf.extended@rf_extended
Perpetual futures will become a primary venue for price discovery in TradFi markets, but they will not replace dated futures and options.
Today, price discovery happens across different instruments. Equities and FX primarily trade on spot markets, while commodities and energy rely on dated futures.
USDC-settled perpetuals offer structural advantages that make them a strong alternative for trading and liquidity concentration:
1. They trade 24/7
2. They aggregate liquidity into a single order book and are structurally standardized
3. They enable higher capital efficiency through continuous margining
Importantly, many of these advantages are structural. Traditional financial markets are not 24/7 not only due to historical inertia, but because risk management and settlement operate in discrete cycles. Margining is not continuous, and collateral transfers and custody updates occur in batches, requiring system-wide coordination.
At the same time, traditional derivatives markets fragment liquidity. Dated futures split liquidity across expiries, while options spread it further across expiries and strikes. As a result, liquidity is distributed across many instruments.
Perpetuals reverse this dynamic by consolidating liquidity into a single instrument per asset and providing a standardized structure across markets, with no rolling and simpler basis management. This makes them easier to hedge and trade.
Perpetuals also allow for more capital-efficient use of margin through continuous risk management and liquidation mechanisms, although this comes with different risk trade-offs compared to the more conservative, discrete systems used in TradFi.
Given these dynamics, USDC-settled perpetuals will become a primary venue for trading and price discovery in TradFi assets over time. However, several challenges remain:
1. Trust and inertia: Institutions will need time to build confidence in crypto-native infrastructure and adapt their internal processes and risk frameworks, for example moving from futures term structure to perp funding dynamics.
2. Index definition: Perpetual markets depend on a clear and reliable reference price. For TradFi assets, this requires consistent and widely accepted methodologies. This means spot-based references for equities and FX, and derived spot prices from futures for commodities and energy. In practice, areas like futures roll and non-trading hours are not yet fully standardised across the industry. We also recognise that the current approach used by Extended is not yet ideal, and we are actively working to improve the definition of a fair and robust reference price.
Even if perps become dominant for trading, they will not replace dated futures and options, as these serve different purposes:
1. Dated futures provide time-specific hedging and a strong link to the real economy through physical delivery and convergence to spot at expiry.
2. Options provide convex payoffs and enable trading and hedging of volatility.
In summary, perpetuals are structurally better suited for liquidity aggregation and continuous trading, and will play a leading role in price discovery. However, they will coexist with dated futures and options, which remain essential for time-specific hedging and non-linear risk management.
Bridging perps and TradFi represents one of the largest and most durable opportunities in financial markets and is a core focus for Extended.
