Don't just focus on trading volume—learn how to distinguish the "true and false prosperity" of perpetual contracts

Title: Reading Perps Beyond Volume

Author: Prathik Desai

Source:

Reprinted from: Mars Finance

Just when you think finance is becoming dull and boring, it always manages to surprise you. Recently, it seems everyone is reconstructing the financial system in ways few anticipated, including those from the entertainment and media industries.

Take Jimmy Donaldson, also known as “MrBeast” on YouTube, for example. He not only owns a snack empire but has recently acquired a banking app aimed at promoting financial literacy and money management among teenagers and young adults. Why? Perhaps nothing is more direct than monetizing a user base of 466 million subscribers through financial products.

This summer, the CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, will launch single-stock futures, allowing users to trade futures on over 50 top U.S. stocks including Alphabet, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Meta.

These reconstructions show us how people’s participation in finance is changing. Over the past few years, nothing illustrates this better than the explosion of the perpetual markets.

Perpetual futures (or Perps) are a type of financial derivative contract that allows market participants to speculate on asset prices without an expiration date. Perps also enable quick and inexpensive expression of market views. They are more attractive than traditional markets because they offer instant access and leverage. Unlike traditional markets, they do not require broker onboarding, jurisdictional paperwork, or adherence to “standard” trading hours.

Moreover, on-chain perpetual markets allow any asset—whether traditional or crypto—to be traded permissionlessly with high leverage. This makes speculation exciting, especially when humans can’t resist betting on volatile assets outside traditional trading hours. This enables real-time pricing of risk.

Think about what happened two weeks ago. When both traditional and crypto markets crashed simultaneously, traders flocked to Hyperliquid, fueling a frenzy in perpetual gold and silver trading. On January 31, Hyperliquid alone accounted for 2% of the global daily silver (XAG) trading volume in its first month of operation on its silver perpetual contract market.

This explains why dashboards of perpetual contract trading volumes are increasingly dominating crypto communities and forums. Trading volume is an absolute measure. It looks large, refreshes every few minutes, and is perfect for leaderboards. But it misses a key nuance: trading volume may reflect a meaningless movement. A market with high trading volume might have deep liquidity, but it could also be driven by incentives encouraging higher-frequency activity. This activity is often recursive and of little significance.

This week, I delved into other metrics of perpetual markets. When used alongside trading volume, these metrics add more dimensions and tell a story quite different from just volume alone.

Let’s get started.

Data Points

The user-friendly interface of perpetual markets makes it a low-barrier, default platform for expressing views across various markets and global assets. The broad choice of high-leverage derivatives trading on a single platform has led to perpetual contracts surpassing spot trading volume on decentralized exchanges. From February 2025, when perpetual trading accounted for 44% of total volume, it has soared to about 75% today (relative to spot trading volume).

This growth has been especially pronounced in recent months:

· Over the four years ending July 31, 2025, the total perpetual trading volume across all platforms reached $6.91 trillion.

· In just the past six months, this volume doubled to $14 trillion.

All this growth occurred against the backdrop of the total cryptocurrency market cap shrinking by nearly 40% from August 1, 2025, to February 9, 2026. This activity indicates that traders are increasingly favoring derivatives trading, hedging, and short-term positioning, especially when spot markets become volatile and bearish.

But there’s a trap. In such massive activity, it’s easy to misread the trading volume indicator. Especially because perpetual trading isn’t just about buying assets and holding long-term; it also involves repeatedly adjusting bets with leverage over shorter timeframes.

Therefore, when market turnover accelerates, an inevitable question arises in my mind: does record-breaking trading volume reflect more capital inflow, or the same capital cycling faster?

This is where observing open interest (OI) becomes meaningful. If trading volume reflects capital movement, then OI measures the unliquidated risk exposure. On perpetual platforms, OI refers to the total USD value of active, unsettled long and short contracts held by traders.

If perpetual trading gains mainstream acceptance, we want to see not only larger capital flows but also proportionally growing open interest.

· In February 2024, the average OI was about $4 billion;

· Now, that figure has tripled to around $13 billion. In fact, the entire month of January saw an average of about $18 billion, then dropped roughly 30% in the first week of February.

While perpetual trading volume has doubled over the past five months, OI has grown by about 50% (from $13 billion to around $18 billion, then back down to $13 billion). To better understand this, I examined the trend of capital efficiency (i.e., OI as a percentage of daily trading volume) over the past year.

The OI/volume ratio jumped 50% from 0.33x last year to today’s 0.49x. But this progress wasn’t smooth; during this 50 basis point increase, there were multiple peaks and valleys:

· First phase (February–May 2025): Quiet period. The OI/volume ratio averaged about 0.46x, with average OI around $4.8 billion and average daily volume about $11.5 billion.

· Second phase (June–mid October): Surge period. The ratio averaged around 0.72x. During this time, average OI rose to $14.8 billion, with daily volume reaching $23 billion. This not only marked a new high in trading volume but also indicated increased risk exposure and greater capital deployment into these derivatives.

· Third phase: Market reversal. This began with the large liquidation on October 10, which wiped out over $19 billion of leveraged positions within 24 hours. From mid-October to late December, the OI/volume ratio declined to about 0.38x, mainly driven by rising trading volume while open interest stagnated. October, November, and December recorded the three highest monthly trading volumes of 2025, each exceeding $1.2 trillion. Meanwhile, average OI was about $15 billion, slightly below the previous three months’ average.

Protocol Layer

Here, I want to add more dimensions at the protocol level. This helps us understand how effectively perpetual trading platforms convert trading activity into “stickiness” capital and revenue.

As of February 10, the top five perpetual trading platforms by 24-hour trading volume are:

· Hyperliquid: Its OI to 7-day average daily volume ratio exceeds 45%, enabling a large share of trading volume to be converted into persistent positions. This indicates that for every $10 traded on the platform, $4.50 is deployed into active positions. This is significant because a high OI ratio leads to narrower spreads, deeper liquidity, and confidence to scale trades without slippage.

· Hyperliquid’s fee revenue reinforces this story. Its take rate is about 3.2 basis points, turning the majority of 24-hour trading volume into fee income.

· Aster: Currently ranked second, with nearly half the trading volume of Hyperliquid, but still maintains a decent 34% capital efficiency (OI/Vol). However, its monetization capability is notable—due to a relatively low take rate (about 1.6 bps), Aster clearly prioritizes platform capital retention over maximizing fee revenue.

· edgeX and Lighter: Both perform similarly on the capital efficiency ladder, with OI/Vol ratios of 21%. However, edgeX’s fee monetization is comparable to Hyperliquid, at 2.8 bps.

Summary

It’s remarkable that today’s perpetual markets are no longer just a story of growth; they require nuanced interpretation across multiple metrics. On a macro level, trading volume has exploded: the cumulative perpetual trading volume over six months exceeds the total of the previous four years. But only when we read OI and volume together does the picture become clearer.

A more definitive victory lies in the growth of the OI/volume ratio. It’s a direct signal that “patient capital” is willing to trust and bet on the various products and markets emerging within perpetual trading platforms.

Looking ahead, it’s more interesting to see how individual players evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, platforms that can optimize “trading conviction” and achieve sustainable monetization will be far more important than those merely dominating trading volume leaderboards through incentives and rewards.