Equity perpetual futures on crypto exchanges handled roughly $250 billion in July, a 17-fold jump from April that turned trading venues into round-the-clock stock markets.
Key Points:
- Equity perpetual futures volume on centralized crypto exchanges reached about $250 billion in July, up from roughly $15 billion in April.
- Binance handled close to $193 billion of that total, or 76% of all activity, while Gate grew fastest at 308% month over month.
- Semiconductor and memory names led by SanDisk dominated the flow, leaving the young market narrowly concentrated.
CryptoQuant Report Tracks Equity Perpetual Surge
Analytics firm CryptoQuant published the figures on Aug. 13 in a study of traditional finance products now listed at digital asset venues. Monthly volume climbed from about $15 billion in April to nearly $250 billion in July. Growth between June and July alone reached 56%.
Binance handled close to $193 billion of the July total, equal to 76% of all activity across the exchanges the firm tracks. Gate grew fastest at 308% month over month and has expanded every month since May, recording roughly $15 billion in July, the same figure the entire market produced in April.
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SanDisk And Chip Stocks Dominate Perpetual Flow
The contracts carry no expiry date and use periodic funding payments to keep their prices close to the underlying stock, a design borrowed from crypto derivatives. That structure lets exchanges quote familiar equities at any hour, including weekends, when conventional markets sit closed. Trading, however, stays packed into a short list of technology names.
SanDisk was the most-traded equity across the venues CryptoQuant follows, taking roughly 57% of equity perpetual volume on HTX, 29% on Gate and 27% on Binance. Volume also clustered in SOXL, a triple-leveraged semiconductor fund, and in SK Hynix and Micron, leaving the AI memory complex in charge of most of the market.
On Gate alone, SanDisk and SK Hynix together accounted for 53% of equity perpetual volume last month. Decentralized venues spread activity more widely, with equities, commodities and index contracts all ranking among the ten largest markets by 90-day volume. SpaceX drew $84.6 billion over that stretch, ahead of Solana (SOL) at $77 billion, while Bitcoin (BTC) led everything at $543 billion and Ethereum (ETH) followed at $246 billion.
Pre-IPO Perpetuals Set Up The Equity Boom
Exchanges have steadily widened their contract lists beyond crypto assets, and non-crypto markets now account for roughly 17% of volume across the ten largest decentralized contracts. Perpetual platforms are turning into "a universal trading layer for a much broader range of liquid assets.
The equity boom follows an earlier run in pre-IPO contracts, where volume climbed from about $2 million in March to $715 million in May and roughly $12 billion in June.
Binance processed more than $5.7 billion in SpaceX perpetuals on Jun. 12, the day the company listed on Nasdaq at $135 a share in the largest initial public offering on record. That contract briefly ranked as the exchange's second-most-traded futures product, behind only Bitcoin perpetuals.
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