BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has declared that crypto-style perpetual futures will "kill" traditional stock exchanges, predicting that equity price discovery for major U.S. benchmarks will migrate to 24/7 perpetual markets on crypto platforms by the end of the decade.
The outspoken crypto trader's forecast arrives as U.S. and Asian exchanges including CBOE and Singapore Exchange prepare to roll out their own perpetual products by the end of 2025. Hayes frames this as an "adapt or die" moment for traditional finance, arguing that established exchanges must copy crypto's perpetual swap model and socialized loss margin systems or lose liquidity and relevance to more nimble crypto venues and decentralized exchanges.
In his latest essay titled "Survival of the Fittest: How Perpetual Contracts Are Disrupting the Traditional Financial Landscape," Hayes revisited how BitMEX's invention of the perpetual swap - a futures-like product with no expiry - reshaped crypto trading by concentrating liquidity into a single contract that tracks spot prices closely while allowing high leverage.
What Happened
Hayes made the case that perpetuals, combined with socialized loss systems and insurance funds, solved two things retail traders want most: access to significant leverage and deep liquidity without the legal risk of owing more than their initial margin if a trade goes wrong. That design, according to Hayes, is now leaking into equities.
He highlighted Hyperliquid's HIP-3, a permissionless protocol upgrade that allowed a firm called trade.xyz to launch a Nasdaq 100 equity perpetual that already trades over $100 million in daily volume. The XYZ100 synthetic market, which tracks Nasdaq futures, generated $320 million in volume within 24 hours of its public launch, leading trading activity among HIP-3 markets.
HIP-3 transforms Hyperliquid from a single decentralized exchange into a permissionless platform where any developer can deploy perpetual futures markets by staking 500,000 HYPE tokens - roughly $25 million at current prices. The first HIP-3 market attracted over $1.3 billion in trading volume within weeks of launch in October, with daily volumes and open interest climbing to approximately $80 million and $70 million respectively by late October.
Trade.xyz now offers around-the-clock perpetual trading for U.S. stocks including Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft, with volumes surpassing $500 million per day. The platform has repeatedly raised its open interest cap from $25 million on October 22 to $60 million, though these figures remain a fraction of traditional markets where E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures contracts traded more than $225 billion in volume on a single day.
Hayes predicted that equity perpetuals will become "the hottest product of 2026," with both centralized exchanges and decentralized platforms racing to list them by year-end. He pointed to changes in the U.S. regulatory landscape, noting that after years of hostility following the FTX collapse and his own legal battles with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the mood shifted in 2025 under President Trump's administration, which has taken a more crypto-friendly stance.
That shift, Hayes believes, has opened the door to sandbox-style experiments for new derivatives and encouraged global regulators to follow Washington's lead, giving exchanges like Singapore Exchange confidence to pursue perpetual listings.
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Why It Matters
Hayes' central claim is that by late this decade, the largest derivatives on key U.S. benchmarks like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 will be perpetuals traded on crypto exchanges, not futures listed on CME and other incumbents. He argues that traditional clearinghouses are constrained by under-capitalized guarantee funds, strict rules around retail leverage and legacy operating hours that cannot keep up with a 24/7 information cycle.
In Hayes' telling, perpetual swaps have flipped that model by letting traders post less collateral while still accessing meaningful exposure, reducing the need to park large sums with an exchange - an increasingly sensitive issue in an industry that has endured multiple hacks and failures.
According to data from TokenInsight, volume traded on perpetual swap contracts easily dwarfs spot trading volumes by a factor of 4-6x. Hayes invented the perpetual swap at BitMEX in 2014, offering traders up to 100x leverage on cash-settled Bitcoin contracts. The product fundamentally changed crypto trading by providing a tool that eliminates many frictions that plagued early derivatives markets, including the monthly expiry cycle that forces traders to constantly roll positions and pay fees.
Instead of expiring, perpetual contracts use funding payments between long and short positions to keep prices anchored to spot prices. When the contract trades above spot, longs pay shorts. When it trades below, shorts pay longs. The market becomes self-correcting, eliminating expiry dates, reducing transaction costs and creating a tool that every crypto exchange immediately copied.
In 2025, even mainstream platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase are launching their own perpetual products, while new exchanges like Hyperliquid are building entire businesses around Hayes' original innovation. Hyperliquid's performance metrics rival those of traditional derivatives markets, capturing 70-73.1 percent of the on-chain perpetual futures market with 24-hour trading volumes peaking at $8.6 billion.
Hayes predicts that the market landscape will significantly change when financial media prioritizes S&P 500 perpetual contract quotes over CME's Globex version. "The next wave of cryptocurrency exchange billionaires will emerge from the intersection of perpetual contracts and stocks," he stated in the essay.
FalconX research projects that incremental fees from HIP-3 builder-deployed perpetual futures markets could drive 67 percent upside for HYPE in the next year, led by stock and index markets. The firm applies conservative estimates suggesting that capturing just 0.75 percent of Magnificent Seven stock volumes would represent daily volumes of $900 million - something that does not seem out of reach considering Hyperliquid already sees $80 million in daily volume on its first HIP-3 market.
On the index side, FalconX believes Hyperliquid could capture up to 0.50 percent of flow going to zero-days-to-expiration options for indices, resulting in daily volumes of approximately $9 billion. Per Bloomberg Intelligence, notional volumes of S&P 500 zero-DTE options alone totaled over $1.5 trillion per day in March 2025 and averaged $1.8 trillion in August 2025.
Hayes himself remains an active and sometimes controversial trader. Recent on-chain data showed him offloading sizable positions in ETH, ENA, ETHFI, LDO, AAVE and UNI after a steep market drop, even though he had previously hinted he would not take profits on his ETH stack. The outlier in his recent positioning is privacy coin ZEC, which he praised after it outperformed the broader altcoin market with triple-digit monthly gains.
Despite the platform's success within the niche tokenized equity futures market, some crypto natives have questioned the architecture. Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, co-founder of competing platform Ostium Labs, argued that Hyperliquid "works great for crypto" but may not be "the right architecture to bring TradFi assets onchain," suggesting that quoting directly from underlying markets would be more appropriate than recreating orderbook liquidity from scratch. Ostium maintains $246 million in open interest across all its assets.