Don't just focus on trading volume; learn to understand the "true and false prosperity" of perpetual contracts

Original Title: Reading Perps Beyond Volume

Original Author: Prathik Desai, Token Dispatch

Original Compilation: Bitpush News

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

Take Jimmy Donaldson (also known as "MrBeast" on YouTube) as an example. He not only has a snack empire but has also recently acquired a banking app aimed at educating teenagers and young adults about financial literacy and money management. Why? Perhaps there’s nothing more direct than monetizing a subscriber base of 466 million using financial products.

This summer, the world's largest derivatives trading market, CME Group, will launch individual 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. And in the past few years, nothing has illustrated 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 people to quickly and cheaply express their views on assets. They are more enticing than traditional markets because they offer instant access and leverage. Unlike traditional markets, they do not require a broker onboarding process, jurisdictional paperwork, or adhere to "traditional" market hours.

Moreover, on-chain perpetual markets allow any asset (whether traditional or crypto) to be traded in a permissionless, highly leveraged manner. This makes speculation exciting, especially when humans cannot resist betting on the trajectory of volatile assets outside traditional trading hours. This allows risk to be priced in real-time.

Think about what happened two weeks ago. When both traditional and crypto markets crashed simultaneously, traders flocked to Hyperliquid, driving perpetual gold and silver trading into a frenzy. On January 31, Hyperliquid alone accounted for 2% of the global daily trading volume in silver perpetual contracts, just under a month after its launch.

This explains why the perpetual contract trading volume dashboard is increasingly dominating crypto communities and forums. Volume is an absolute value. It looks large, refreshing every few minutes, making it perfect for leaderboards. But it misses a key nuance: volume may reflect a meaningless movement. High trading volume in a market could be due to sufficient depth, but it could also be because rewards and incentives encourage higher frequency activity. This activity is often recursive and not very meaningful.

This week, I delved into other indicators of the perpetual trading market. When these indicators are used in conjunction with trading volume, they can add more dimensions and tell a story completely different from mere trading volume.

Let’s get started.

A Few Data Points

The user-friendly interface of perpetual markets makes them a low-barrier, default interface for expressing views across various markets and global assets. The wide selection of high-leverage derivative trading on a single platform has led to perpetual contract trading volume surpassing the spot trading volume on decentralized exchanges. From 44% in February 2025, the share of perpetual contract trading volume has skyrocketed to around 75% today (relative to spot trading volume).

This growth has been particularly significant in recent months:

• As of July 31, 2025, the total cumulative perpetual trading volume across all platforms was $6.91 trillion.
• In just the past six months, this volume has doubled to $14 trillion.

All this growth occurred against the backdrop of a nearly 40% decline in the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies from August 1, 2025, to February 9, 2026. This activity indicates that traders are increasingly leaning towards derivatives trading, hedging, and short-term positioning, especially as the spot market becomes highly volatile and bearish.

But there’s a catch. In such a massive activity, it’s easy to misinterpret trading volume metrics. Especially since perpetual trading is not just about buying assets and holding them long-term; it also involves leveraging and adjusting bet sizes repeatedly within shorter time frames.

Therefore, when market turnover rapidly increases, an inevitable question arises in my mind: Does record trading volume reflect more capital inflow, or is the same capital circulating at a faster pace?

This is where observing Open Interest (OI) becomes significant. If trading volume reflects capital flow, then OI measures the unclosed risk exposure. In perpetual trading platforms, OI refers to the total dollar value of active and unsettled long and short contracts held by traders.

If perpetual trading is accepted by the broader market, we not only want to see larger capital flows but also a proportionate increase in open interest.

• Last February, OI averaged around $4 billion;
• Now that number has more than tripled to about $13 billion. In fact, the average for the entire month of January reached about $18 billion, before dropping about 30% in the first week of February.

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

The OI/volume ratio jumped 50% from last year’s 0.33x to today’s 0.49x. However, this progress has not been smooth, experiencing several peaks and troughs during the 50 basis point increase in the ratio:

• Phase One (February 2025 - May): A period of quiet. The OI/volume ratio averaged around 0.46x, with average OI around $4.8 billion and average daily trading volume around $11.5 billion.
• Phase Two (June - mid-October): A leap phase. The ratio averaged about 0.72x. During this period, average OI rose to $14.8 billion, with average daily trading volume of $23 billion. This not only marked a historic high in trading volume but also indicated an increase in risk exposure and greater capital commitment to these derivatives.
• Phase Three: Market reversal. The beginning of this phase coincided with a massive liquidation on October 10, wiping out over $19 billion in leveraged positions within 24 hours. From mid-October to late December, the OI/volume ratio fell to ~0.38x, primarily driven by an increase in trading volume while open interest stagnated. October, November, and December recorded the three highest monthly trading volumes of 2025, averaging over $1.2 trillion each month. During the same period, OI averaged around $15 billion, slightly below the average of the previous three months.

Protocol Level

Here, I want to add more dimensions to the perpetual market at the protocol level. This helps us understand how efficiently perpetual trading platforms convert trading activity into "sticky capital" and revenue.

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

• Hyperliquid: Its OI to 7-day average daily trading volume ratio exceeds 45%, able to convert a significant share of trading volume into lasting positions. This indicates that for every $10 traded on this platform, $4.5 is allocated to active positions. This is important because a high OI rate leads to narrower spreads, deeper liquidity, and confidence in scaling trades without slippage.
• Hyperliquid's fee revenue reinforces this story. Its take rate is about 3.2 basis points, effectively converting the largest share of 24-hour trading volume into fee revenue.
• Aster: Currently ranked second, despite having trading volume that is only about half of Hyperliquid's, it still boasts a decent capital efficiency of 34% (OI/Vol). However, its monetization ability is noteworthy—due to a lower take rate (around 1.6 bps), Aster clearly prioritizes capital retention on its platform over maximizing fees.

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

Conclusion

It is remarkable that today’s perpetual contract market is no longer a simple growth story; it requires nuanced interpretations of multiple metrics. On a macro level, trading volume has exploded: the cumulative perpetual trading volume growth over six months exceeds the total of the previous four years. But the picture only becomes clear when OI and trading volume are read together.

A more explicit victory is the growth of the OI/volume ratio. This is a direct signal indicating that there is "patient capital" willing to trust and bet on the various products and markets emerging on perpetual trading platforms.

What will be more interesting in the future is how individual players will evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, those trading platforms that can optimize "trading conviction" and achieve sustainable monetization will be far more important than those that merely rely on rewards and incentives to dominate trading volume leaderboards.

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