Messari: Trading US Stocks on Perp DEX, the Next New Frontier

By: blockbeats|2025/10/27 13:30:05

Original Article Title: Equity Perps: Tall Orders and Slow Beginnings

Original Article Author: Sam, Messari Research

Original Article Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Key Insights:

Equity perpetual contracts still belong to a high-potential but unproven area, with limited appeal in the on-chain market mainly due to misaligned audience, weak demand, and more popular alternatives (such as 0DTE options).

For example, the daily average trading volume of equity perpetual contracts on the Ostium platform is only $1.8 million, while cryptocurrency perpetual contracts reach as high as $44.3 million, demonstrating a weak market demand.

This may imply that due to infrastructure and regulatory constraints, market demand has not been fully unleashed. Hyperliquid's recent HIP-3 upgrade has provided the best opportunity for equity perpetual contracts, but the adoption process is expected to be gradual.

Messari: Trading US Stocks on Perp DEX, the Next New Frontier

Source: Messari (@0xCryptoSam)

Equity perpetual contracts are considered the inevitable next blue ocean in the on-chain market, but current data suggests that this area is still challenging to break through in the short term. Ostium, as a decentralized exchange focusing on real-world assets (RWAs), has a daily average trading volume of equity perpetual contracts of only $1.8 million, while cryptocurrency perpetual contracts reach $44.3 million, reflecting weak demand.

This adoption gap is mainly due to misaligned audience. On-chain traders have little interest in stocks, while off-chain platforms (such as Robinhood) allow traders to easily trade stocks and options but not perpetual contracts. International investors may be a potential target audience as they cannot directly access the US stock market. However, these investors may prefer to hold stocks directly to gain shareholder rights while avoiding funding costs and settlement risks.

Compared to tokens, stocks have fewer interoperability challenges, benefiting from the convenience of synthetic wrapping. For the average investor, almost every stock in the global market has already been abstracted through the search bar's individual stock code. Therefore, even though perpetual contracts add permissionless and censorship-resistant features to stocks, ordinary stock investors are either unaware of this or simply not interested.

Source: fow

The most likely users of stock perpetual contracts are retail options traders (who drive 50%-60% of 0DTE trades on the Robinhood platform). However, traditional exchanges relying on banking services will only adopt stock perpetual contracts when the law is clear. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has approved perpetual contract trading for BTC and ETH, but these two have been deemed non-securities. While perpetual contracts are more intuitive than options, the popularization of stock perpetual contracts may be slower than expected due to the close link between retail adoption paths and legal clarity.

Source: @Kaleb0x

Let's discuss the potential development direction of stock perpetual contracts under the background of the HIP-3 upgrade on Hyperliquid. HIP-3 introduces a permissionless perpetual contract market, and data shows that less than 10% of Hyperliquid addresses have bridged to Aster, Lighter, and edgeX, with even fewer users opting for multiple perpetual contract decentralized exchange (DEX) platforms. This indicates that funds on Hyperliquid are sticky and of higher quality. Based on this data, the future of stock perpetual contracts can be predicted from two perspectives:

Hyperliquid users are loyal to the platform and, regardless of asset listings or features, they are more likely to choose Hyperliquid over other perpetual contract DEXs.

Hyperliquid users are satisfied with the current perpetual contract market products.

I believe both of these viewpoints make sense. Considering that Hyperliquid users have not massively shifted funds in the face of incentives, they may be loyal to Hyperliquid. However, as most of the trading volume and open interest on Hyperliquid are concentrated in mainstream assets, similar to other perpetual contract DEXs, it is currently difficult to determine whether Hyperliquid users care about market diversity and whether stock perpetual contracts are attractive to regular users (more importantly, to the whales holding 70% of Hyperliquid's open interest).

In addition, these traders may also have accounts on both traditional trading platforms and brokerage platforms, further limiting the potential market size of stock perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid.

It is worth noting that stock perpetual contracts may not bring new open interest or trading volume to Hyperliquid but may instead divert existing trading volume.

Although Ostium (with an annual average perpetual contract trading volume of $220 billion) and stock tokenization tools (such as xStocks, with a spot trading volume of $2.79 billion) have not yet experienced explosive growth, this may reflect infrastructure limitations rather than a lack of underlying demand. This pattern mirrors the early growth trajectory of perpetual contracts. GMX demonstrated the demand for on-chain perpetual contract markets, but the infrastructure at the time could not support sustained trading volume. Hyperliquid overcame this bottleneck, unleashing latent demand. By the same logic, after stock perpetual contracts receive the necessary performance and liquidity enhancements under HIP-3, they may find their first scalable product-market fit on Hyperliquid. While current data cannot confirm this outcome, this precedent is worth noting.

Compared to 0DTE options, the long-term potential of stock perpetual contracts remains evident. Projects like Trade[XYZ] can leverage regulatory arbitrage to build an early user base before entering the market on traditional exchanges. However, the real challenge lies in attracting off-chain retail traders, which has always been difficult for crypto applications.

Original Article Link

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has shown strong momentum across multiple dimensions. The mainstream discussion has focused on Coinbase's official entry into the prediction market through the acquisition of The Clearing Company, as well as the intense controversy within the AAVE community regarding token incentives and governance rights.

In terms of ecosystem development, Solana has introduced the innovative Kora fee layer aimed at reducing user transaction costs; meanwhile, the Perp DEX competition has intensified, with the showdown between Hyperliquid and Lighter sparking widespread community discussion on the future of decentralized derivatives.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Coinbase Acquires The Clearing Company, Officially Entering Prediction Market

This week, Coinbase announced the acquisition of The Clearing Company, marking another significant move to deepen its presence in this field after last week's announcement of launching a prediction market on its platform.

The Clearing Company's founder, Toni Gemayel, and the team will join Coinbase to jointly drive the development of the prediction market business.

Coinbase's Product Lead, Shan Aggarwal, stated that the growth of the prediction market is still in its early stages and predicts that 2026 will be the breakout year for this field.

The community has reacted positively to this, generally believing that Coinbase's entry will bring significant traffic and compliance advantages to the prediction market. However, this has also sparked discussions about the industry's competitive landscape.

Jai Bhavnani, Founder of Rivalry, commented that for startups, if their product model proves to be successful, industry giants like Coinbase have ample reason to replicate it.

This serves as a reminder to all entrepreneurs in the crypto space that they must build significant moats to withstand competition pressure from these giants.

2. Kalshi Launches Kalshi Research and Integrates BSC Network

Regulated prediction market platform Kalshi launched its research arm, Kalshi Research, this week, aimed at opening its internal data to the academic community and researchers to facilitate exploration of prediction market-related topics.

Its inaugural research report highlights Kalshi's outperformance in predicting inflation compared to Wall Street's traditional models. Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara commented that the power of prediction markets lies in the valuable data they generate, and it is now time to better utilize this data.

Meanwhile, Kalshi announced its support for the BNB Chain (BSC), allowing users to deposit and withdraw BNB and USDT via the BSC network.

This move is seen as a significant step for Kalshi to open its platform to a broader crypto user base, aiming to unlock access to the world's largest prediction market. Furthermore, Kalshi also revealed plans to host the first Prediction Market Summit in 2026 to further drive industry engagement and development.

3. AAVE Token Incentive Controversy Persists as Founders and Whales Increase Holdings Against the Market Trend

The AAVE community recently engaged in heated debates around an Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP) titled "AAVE Tokenomics Alignment Phase One - Ownership Governance," aiming to transfer ownership and control of the Aave brand from Aave Labs to Aave DAO.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov publicly stated his intention to vote against the proposal, believing it oversimplifies the complex legal and operational structure, potentially slowing down the development process of core products like Aave V4.

The community's reaction was polarized. Some criticized Stani for adopting a "double standard" in governance and questioned whether his team had siphoned off protocol revenue, while others supported his cautious stance, arguing that significant governance changes require more thorough discussion.

This controversy highlights the tension between the ideal of DAO governance in DeFi projects and the actual power held by core development teams.

Despite governance disputes putting pressure on the AAVE token price, on-chain data shows that Stani Kulechov himself has purchased millions of dollars' worth of AAVE in the past few hours.

Simultaneously, a whale address, 0xDDC4, which had been quiet for 6 months, once again spent 500 ETH (approximately $1.53 million) to purchase 9,629 AAVE tokens. Data indicates that this whale has accumulated nearly 40,000 AAVE over the past year but is currently in an unrealized loss position.

The founder and whale's increased holdings during market volatility were interpreted by some investors as a confidence signal in AAVE's long-term value.

4. Top Articles: DeFi Curators and Ethereum Annual Summary

In this week's top article, Morpho Labs' "Curator Explained" detailed the role of "curators" in DeFi.

The article likened curators to asset managers in traditional finance, who design, deploy, and manage on-chain vaults, providing users with a one-click diversified investment portfolio.

Unlike traditional fund managers, DeFi curators execute strategies automatically through non-custodial smart contracts, allowing users to maintain full control of their assets. The article offered a new perspective on the specialization and risk management in the DeFi space.

Another widely circulated article, "Ethereum 2025: From Experiment to Global Infrastructure," provided a comprehensive summary of Ethereum's development over the past year. The article noted that 2025 is a crucial year for Ethereum's transition from an experimental project to global financial infrastructure. Through the Pectra and Fusaka hard forks, Ethereum achieved significant reductions in account abstraction and transaction costs.

Furthermore, the SEC's clarification of Ethereum's "non-securities" nature and the launch of tokenized funds on the Ethereum mainnet by traditional financial giants like JPMorgan marked Ethereum's gaining recognition from mainstream institutions. The article suggested that whether it is the continued growth of DeFi, the thriving L2 ecosystem, or the integration with the AI field, Ethereum's vision as the "world computer" is gradually becoming a reality.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana: Launches Kora Fee Layer and propAMM Data Research

The Solana Foundation engineering team released a fee layer solution called Kora this week.

Kora is a fee relayer and signatory node designed to provide the Solana ecosystem with a more flexible transaction fee payment method. Through Kora, users will be able to achieve gas-free transactions or choose to pay network fees using any stablecoin or SPL token. This innovation is seen as an important step in lowering the barrier of entry for new users and improving Solana network's availability.

Additionally, a deep research report on propAMM (proactive market maker) sparked community interest. The report's data analysis of propAMMs on Solana like HumidiFi indicated that Solana has achieved, or even surpassed, the level of transaction execution quality in traditional finance (TradFi) markets.

For example, on the SOL-USDC trading pair, HumidiFi is able to provide a highly competitive spread for large trades (0.4-1.6 bps), which is already better than the trading slippage of some mid-cap stocks in traditional markets.

Research suggests that propAMM is making the vision of the "Internet Capital Market" a reality, with Solana emerging as the prime venue for all of this to happen.

2. Perp DEX: Hyperliquid vs. Lighter Competition Intensifies

The competition in the perpetual contract DEX (Perp DEX) space is becoming increasingly heated.

In its latest official article, Hyperliquid has positioned its emerging competitor, Lighter, alongside centralized exchanges like Binance, referring to it as a platform utilizing a centralized sequencer. Hyperliquid emphasizes its transparency advantage of being "fully on-chain, operated by a validator network, and with no hidden state."

The community widely interprets this as Hyperliquid declaring "war" on Lighter. The technical differences between the two platforms have also become a focal point of discussion: Hyperliquid focuses on ultimate on-chain transparency, while Lighter emphasizes achieving "verifiable execution" through zero-knowledge proofs to provide users with a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB)-like trading experience.

This battle over the future direction of decentralized derivatives exchanges is expected to peak in 2026.

Meanwhile, discussions about Lighter's trading fees have surfaced. Some users have pointed out that Lighter charged as much as 81 basis points (0.81%) for a $2 million USD/JPY forex trade, far exceeding the near-zero spreads of traditional forex brokers.

Some argue that Lighter does not follow a B-book model that bets against market makers, instead anchoring its prices to the TradFi market, and the high fees may be related to the current liquidity or market maker balance incentives. Providing a more competitive spread for real-world assets (RWA) in the highly volatile crypto market is a key issue Lighter will need to address in the future.

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