The Last Barrier Between Onchain and Traditional Markets Is Disappearing

Much of the institutional attention around the convergence of traditional finance and crypto has centered on tokenization: the process of representing existing assets as onchain tokens. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund crossed $1 billion in AUM. JPMorgan launched a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum. The narrative has coalesced around a simple premise. Put traditional assets on a blockchain, and the two worlds merge.

That framing captures part of the picture but misses the more significant development. Tokenization replicates existing instruments in a new format. What is reshaping market structure is not the digitization of old instruments, but the emergence of perpetual futures contracts that make every traditional market tradeable onchain, around the clock, from a single self-custodial wallet. Unlike conventional futures, perpetuals carry no expiry date, settling continuously and eliminating the rollover friction that has historically fragmented exposure across time.

The distinction between “crypto markets” and “traditional markets” is becoming structurally irrelevant.

Futures Have Always Been the Unifying Primitive

This pattern is not new. Futures contracts originated in agricultural commodity markets centuries ago, matured through centralized exchanges in Chicago and London, and expanded into financial futures covering currencies, interest rates, and equity indices in the decades that followed. Each expansion followed the same logic: synthetic exposure reduced friction, broadened access, and unified previously siloed markets into continuous, globally accessible instruments.

Many of the tools that now define modern finance began as specialized instruments used by a small set of participants. Options, swaps, and index futures all followed this trajectory from niche to infrastructure. Each was initially viewed as exotic or unnecessary by incumbents who saw no reason to change the existing structure. Each became foundational.

Onchain perpetual futures are following the same trajectory.

The Scale of What Is Already Happening

The data has moved well past the experimental phase. The onchain derivatives sector market cap grew 654% year over year, from roughly $2.5 billion to $18.9 billion, according to CoinCodeCap and BitDegree. Decentralized exchanges surpassed $1 trillion in monthly perpetual futures volume by the end of 2025. By mid-2025, Hyperliquid alone was processing $357 billion per month. Since then, the market has diversified: competitors like Aster and Lighter have gained meaningful share, pushing Hyperliquid’s dominance from roughly 80% to under 40%. That fragmentation is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that onchain derivatives infrastructure is maturing past its single-platform phase.

The more telling signal is not aggregate volume but where the growth concentrates. Ostium, the leading protocol purpose-built for real-world asset perpetuals, has processed $25 billion in cumulative volume, with more than 95% of its open interest in traditional markets like gold, oil, and foreign exchange, according to The Block and CoinDesk. During periods of macroeconomic instability, Ostium’s real-world asset volumes outpaced its crypto volumes by a factor of four, and by a factor of eight on peak days. After China’s quantitative easing announcement, FX and commodities perps volume jumped 550%.

When macro events move markets, traders increasingly express those views onchain.

The convergence is also forming from the other direction. Coinbase has declared 2026 the year of the “Everything Exchange,” targeting crypto, equities, prediction markets, and commodities, with perpetual futures for stocks in development. dYdX announced plans to introduce perpetual futures for synthetic equities like Tesla. The direction is uniform across every major platform, whether crypto-native or not.

Then there are the incumbents. CME Group began 24/7 crypto futures trading on February 9, 2026, and is developing a proprietary blockchain-based settlement token with a Google Cloud-powered tokenized cash solution. CME’s crypto trading volumes increased 92% year over year, reaching $13 billion in average daily notional value, according to CoinDesk.

The incumbents are not standing on the sidelines.

What Is Changing Now

What is changing now is not the technology, but the regulatory and collateral infrastructure that allows onchain futures to function as legitimate financial primitives rather than experimental instruments.

The Regulatory and Collateral Inflection

On December 8, 2025, the CFTC launched its Digital Assets Pilot Program, allowing futures commission merchants to accept tokenized Treasuries, money market fund shares, stablecoins, BTC, and ETH as derivatives collateral, according to the CFTC press release. Full rulemaking for blockchain-native collateral, margin, clearing, and settlement is expected by August 2026. When the world’s largest derivatives regulator accepts crypto-native and tokenized assets as collateral for futures positions in traditional markets, the jurisdictional wall between “crypto” and “finance” ceases to be structural. It becomes administrative.

The SEC and CFTC have reinforced this direction with “Project Crypto,” a joint framework establishing a shared taxonomy and coordinated oversight, as outlined by Cleary Gottlieb and Morgan Lewis. Forthcoming rulemakings will cover tokenized securities, market structure for multi-asset platforms, and an innovation exemption for novel models. Comprehensive bipartisan crypto market structure legislation is expected in 2026.

The implications are concrete. A freelance commodities trader posts tokenized Treasuries as margin for a gold futures position from a personal wallet. A family office hedges equity exposure through an onchain perpetual contract collateralized with stablecoins. A small market-making firm uses the same capital base to provide liquidity across crypto, commodities, and forex simultaneously. These are not hypothetical workflows. They are the explicit design targets of the regulatory infrastructure taking shape now.

The Shape of the Unified Market

A unified collateral and settlement layer means capital currently fragmented across brokerage accounts, futures clearing houses, and crypto wallets can consolidate. The efficiency gains are structural, not incremental. Tokenized assets are projected to surpass $50 billion in 2026, up from $18.5 billion through 2025, according to CoinDesk. Monthly transfer volumes for tokenized equities have climbed 76% in the past 30 days alone, per rwa.xyz data.

The persistent friction in global markets has been jurisdictional segmentation: different assets, different exchanges, different hours, different intermediaries. Onchain perpetual futures, collateralized by universally accepted digital assets and settling continuously, compress that fragmentation into a single layer. The result is not a new market. It is the removal of the boundaries that made markets feel separate in the first place.

But infrastructure alone does not drive adoption. The missing layer is the interface. Today, accessing onchain futures still requires navigating separate platforms, bridging assets between networks, and managing isolated accounts for trading, spending, and saving. The next step is an account model where the same balance a user spends from a card, earns yield on in a vault, and uses to fund a futures position are one and the same. When spending, saving, and trading draw from a single pool of capital, the operational distinction between “managing finances” and “trading markets” collapses. That is the UX inflection that turns infrastructure access into habitual participation.

The infrastructure is maturing faster than the interfaces. But the gap is closing. The collateral layer exists. The settlement layer is forming. The regulatory scaffolding is taking shape. What remains is the normalization of access, the point at which this unified market becomes embedded in the everyday experience of managing money, no different from checking a bank balance.

The Convergence Ahead

For decades, the distinction between “traditional” and “alternative” markets has been treated as fundamental. Increasingly, it looks like it was merely a function of infrastructure that had not yet caught up.