Most Real-World Asset Perpetuals Now Trade Onchain

Eighty-six percent of trading volume in perpetual futures on real-world assets now happens onchain, according to Crypto Briefing. A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date, held in line with the spot price by a funding payment exchanged between longs and shorts. A real-world asset perp references something that exists off chain: a single stock, an index, a commodity, a bond yield.

The share matters because it is unusual. In crypto's own markets, perpetuals on bitcoin and ether remain overwhelmingly a centralised exchange product, with onchain venues taking a minority of flow. For real-world asset references, the reported split runs the other way.

Why the split looks like this

The straightforward explanation is regulatory rather than technical. A centralised exchange with a licence and identified customers cannot casually list a perpetual on a US single stock, because doing so places it squarely inside securities and derivatives rules in every jurisdiction where its users sit. A permissionless contract has no listing committee and no licence to lose, so the product appears there first.

The second explanation is that there was nothing to compete with. Onchain perpetual venues built the exposure because nobody else was offering round-the-clock leverage on an equity reference, and the demand that turned up had no centralised alternative. A dominant share of a young market is easier to hold than a dominant share of an old one.

What the number does not say

A percentage share says nothing about size. Eighty-six percent of a small market is still a small market, and the reported figure carries no absolute volume alongside it. Perp volume is also flattered by leverage: notional turnover on a levered product is a multiple of the capital actually committed, which makes it a poor proxy for how much money is genuinely positioned in real-world asset exposure.

Nor does it tell you how concentrated the onchain side is. If most of the flow sits on one or two venues, the headline is less a statement about decentralised markets than about a couple of order books.

The direction of travel

The composition is likely to shift. Crypto.com and Coinbase have both filed to offer perpetual futures on single US stocks, which would put regulated, centralised venues into the same product for the first time. If those launches land, the 86 percent share is being measured against a denominator that is about to grow.

That is the thing worth tracking. A dominant share that falls while absolute volume rises is a healthy market getting bigger. A dominant share that holds while volume stays flat is a niche that regulated venues looked at and declined.