For most of crypto's history, a perpetual future was a way to put leverage on BTC, ETH, or an altcoin. That definition no longer covers what the product is being used for.
In its outlook for 2026, a16z crypto framed the debate as "perpification vs. tokenization": instead of wrapping every real-world asset as a token, you can give it a synthetic perp market, which is often simpler to build and can carry deeper liquidity. Nine months later, the numbers suggest the idea landed. According to a16z crypto's September data, RWA perpetuals did $117.3B in volume in August 2026, roughly 44x year over year, with about $101B of that on-chain. RWA perp open interest grew from $161M to $4.8B over the same period.
This piece is a map of that shift. It breaks perpification into four layers, then looks at where the pricing and risk questions concentrate, because they don't disappear when an asset becomes a perp. They move.
Why the perp is the container
A perpetual future has three properties that make it a general-purpose pricing wrapper:
- No expiry. There's no scheduled expiry or contract roll. How long a position can stay open depends on margin and the venue's rules for that market.
- Flexible trading hours. Many on-chain perp markets trade around the clock. Others deliberately follow the underlying asset's trading schedule.
- Funding that anchors price. Periodic funding payments pull the contract toward its reference index without anyone needing to deliver the underlying.
Put those together and anything that changes continuously and has a credible reference price can, in principle, become a perp. The four layers below are what happens when builders take that literally.
Layer 1: The underlying — what gets listed
The first layer is the simplest: the list of things you can trade has grown far beyond crypto.
On-chain perp venues now list US single stocks, equity indices, gold, oil, FX, and pre-IPO companies. By September, more than 1,000 RWA perp markets were live across perp DEXs, and 747 of them referenced public equities.
The mix inside RWA perps has shifted too. In August, equities made up 48% of RWA perp volume, commodities 28%, and indices 18%. Equity open interest overtook commodities in June; equity volume followed in July.
The clearest demonstration of why this matters came in March. When conflict involving Iran broke out over a weekend, traditional oil futures were closed. On-chain crude perps weren't. JPMorgan analysts noted a surge of activity from non-crypto investors, and one on-chain crude market hit $1.7B in peak daily volume. For a few days, on-chain crude perps were one of the few venues where oil was being priced at all.
Pre-IPO names are the most aggressive edge of this layer. Perps referencing OpenAI and Anthropic have been listed on multiple on-chain venues. SpaceX traded as a pre-IPO perp until its June 2026 listing, at which point it became an ordinary equity market.
We've covered pieces of this layer before: gold perpetuals and stock perps on LeverUp.
Layer 2: Market creation — who gets to list
The second layer is about who can create a market.
On most exchanges, listing is a centralized decision. Permissionless market deployment changes that. The best-known example is Hyperliquid's HIP-3: a deployer stakes 500,000 HYPE and can launch its own perp markets, defining the oracle, the contract specification, and leverage limits.
That design became an important route for RWA perps on that venue. Builder-deployed markets went from a low single-digit share of that venue's perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly half by mid-summer, according to CoinDesk. Index providers have started to engage as well: S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the S&P 500 for a builder-deployed perpetual in March.
The same idea is spreading beyond perps. HIP-4 adds fully collateralized outcome contracts, which are useful for prediction markets and bounded option-like payoffs, on the same matching engine. Moving the other way, Polymarket launched perpetuals in September, with up to 20x leverage on crypto, the S&P 500, and major commodities, and a lower cap on single stocks.
The shift here is structural. When eligible deployers can create markets, the venue starts to look like infrastructure, and market-specific choices (which oracle, what leverage, which contract spec) sit with whoever deployed that market, within the venue's protocol-level rules.
Layer 3: Collateral — what you post as margin
The third layer changes what traders post as margin.
Tokenized stocks and ETFs are starting to function as margin. Ondo's perp product, for example, accepts tokenized securities alongside stablecoins as collateral for equity, index, and commodity perps. The practical effect is that a holder of a tokenized stock can hedge or add exposure without selling the spot position first.
This is where tokenization and perpification stop competing and start fitting together: the token is what you hold, and the perp is what you use to manage it.
Regulated venues in the US are moving in the same direction. After the CFTC opened the door to onshore perps in May, Coinbase, Kraken's parent Payward, and OG.com all filed in September to offer single-stock perpetuals. None had been approved at the time of writing.
We made the longer argument for why flexible collateral is the choke point in RWA Meets Perpetuals, and walked through the capital-structure logic in AnyCollateral: Beyond Multi-Collateral Trading. The short version: once assets other than stablecoins arrive on-chain, the ability to post them as margin without selling them becomes a large part of how useful the derivatives layer is.
Layer 4: The perp as a building block
The fourth layer is the most experimental. Here the perp stops being the product and becomes a building block other products are built from.
Two patterns stand out:
- Data perps. Perp City lists perpetuals on continuous real-world signals, such as vessel traffic near the Strait of Hormuz, built from AIS ship-tracking data. Volumes are still very small, but the design point is clear: if a signal updates continuously, it can have a perp.
- Fee-funded positions. Launchpads such as PerpsPad on Solana attach a leveraged perp position to each launched token and route trading fees into a treasury that buys back and burns the token. The token's value is partly tied to how that position performs.
Around these sit related experiments: funded-trader programs, perp-backed vaults, and designs that recycle spot trading fees into derivatives exposure.
Where the risk goes
Perpification is real, but a perp is only as sound as its reference price. Each layer above moves pricing risk somewhere specific, and it's worth being precise about where.
Pre-IPO markets have no spot anchor. A perp on a private company has no continuously traded underlying. Its reference price comes from an oracle design, secondary-market marks, or the venue's own mark price, and those can differ meaningfully across venues. Sometimes the result is close: an on-chain Cerebras perp traded within about 1.3% of the company's Nasdaq opening price an hour before its debut, according to Coin Metrics. But one close match doesn't establish a pattern, and before listing there's no spot market for arbitrage to correct the price against.
Builder-deployed markets add a layer of parameter choices. When a deployer picks the oracle and leverage limits for a market, those choices shape how the market prices and how positions behave under stress, alongside whatever controls the venue enforces at the protocol level. In early markets, activity also tends to concentrate among a small number of deployers. Traders in these markets are evaluating the deployer's design as well as the asset.
Data perps are only as good as their data. A shipping-traffic index built on AIS is exposed to ships going dark. In May, Windward observed 97 vessels near the northern Hormuz corridor with only 3 transmitting AIS, alongside location spoofing and GPS jamming. Missing or spoofed inputs weaken the raw data; how much that affects a tradable index depends on its validation, aggregation, and fallback design.
Perp-backed tokens carry the position's risk. Where a token's economics depend on a leveraged position, returns depend on that position's performance and liquidation risk, not only on fee income. If the position is liquidated, that part of the backing is gone.
Off-hours pricing is a design choice, not a free feature. Round-the-clock trading on an asset whose primary market is closed means the perp becomes the price-discovery venue, with no underlying market to hedge against or reference. That can be valuable, as the March oil episode showed. It also means liquidations can happen on prices nobody can hedge.
This last point is where venues make different choices. On LeverUp, MAG7 equity perps trade Monday to Friday, 9:31 AM to 3:59 PM ET, and are closed on weekends. Positions above 10x are force-closed at market close. Positions at or below 10x can be held over nights and weekends, subject to funding. Outside the session, opening or closing positions, placing new orders, and liquidations are disabled; traders can still add collateral, cancel orders, or edit TP/SL. The trade-off is explicit: you give up weekend price action on these stocks, and in exchange liquidations on these markets are paused while the underlying market is closed. Neither approach is universally right. They answer different questions about where the reference price should come from when the primary market is shut. The trading RWA docs have the full rules.
The same logic runs through oracle design in general. We covered how validator permissions and protection triggers defend reference prices in Oracle Integrity, and the basics of how feeds work in What Is Oracle Pricing in DeFi?.
What to watch
For anyone tracking perpification over the next few quarters, three threads carry most of the signal:
- Builder-deployed equity and commodity markets. Whether RWA open interest keeps growing, and whether activity spreads across more deployers as more teams list markets.
- US single-stock perp approvals. The Coinbase, Kraken, and OG.com filings will show whether regulated onshore venues can offer the same product, and on what trading hours.
- Whether perp-as-component designs move to deeper venues. Fee-funded positions and data perps are small today. The test is whether they survive contact with real liquidity.
Perpification doesn't make every asset tradeable on equal terms. It expands the range of assets and signals that can support a perp, wherever a credible reference price and workable risk controls exist. The interesting questions are now about whose reference price it uses, who carries the risk when that price is wrong, and what happens when the underlying market is closed.
Further reading on LeverUp: