[Download the report (PDF)]

A perpetual future is a derivative that provides continuous exposure to the price of an asset as long as the holder maintains the position. In other words, perpetuals are futures contracts with no expiry date. This design concentrates liquidity in a single contract rather than a ladder of maturities, carries no mandatory rolls, provides more accessible contract sizes, and is uniquely conducive to 24/7 trading. For American hedgers and traders, each of these features expands the choice of tools available for assuming and managing price risk.

As perpetual futures enter the U.S. market for the first time, an old question in market design has come with them. When a novel product arrives, does it give the market new capacity, or is it zero-sum, with new gains coming at the expense of the markets that came before it? We set out to answer that question empirically, asking what perpetual futures add for hedgers and for price discovery, and what, if anything, they take from existing dated futures markets. 

Today, Hyperliquid Policy Center published Perpetual Futures as Complements to Dated Futures, a research report that puts that question to the test. The findings support complementarity: perpetual futures expand hedging choice and improve price discovery, and we found no statistically significant evidence of harm to benchmark markets.

Our research takes advantage of a built-in feature of markets: benchmark futures like the CME Group's bitcoin and WTI oil contracts close every weekend, and perpetual markets do not. Each weekend is therefore a natural experiment. We compare the prices formed in perpetual markets while traditional markets were closed against the prices set in those markets at reopen.

Using tick- and minute-level data, we ran that comparison across 205 weekends of bitcoin trading and 19 sample weekends of onchain xyz:CL oil perpetuals. The data support five findings:

• Perpetual futures perform the familiar risk-transfer function of dated futures at lower cost. Dated futures expire, so a hedger has to sell the expiring contract and buy the next one on a fixed calendar, whatever the trade costs that day. In April 2026, rolling the benchmark contract on Monday cost roughly $950,000 on $10 million of exposure; the identical trade that Friday cost roughly $110,000. A perpetual position never forces that trade.

• Perpetual futures open hedging to participants that standard contracts do not economically serve. Median onchain oil perpetual trades during off-hours run near $1,300, roughly 100 times smaller than the median benchmark WTI trade, which reflects new demand for risk transfer rather than demand pulled from the benchmark.

• Off-hours perpetual futures prices deliver useful price discovery. Across 205 weekends of bitcoin trading, the benchmark reopen confirmed the perpetual's weekend price almost exactly. The young onchain oil market shows the same pattern across 19 cleanly observable weekends. 

• Hedgers can act on that information at realistic cost. When crude repriced 15.8% over the weekend of March 6, 2026, the benchmark market was closed the entire time. A hedger who used the onchain oil perpetual through that weekend would have cut a $1.58 million loss on a $10 million position to roughly $62,000, after all costs.

• Perpetual markets show no statistically significant harm to the incumbent markets they reference. After the onchain oil market launched, the benchmark WTI market reopened after weekends with slightly tighter spreads (the gap between buying and selling prices) and settled into normal trading about 46 minutes faster than pre-launch history predicts. Volatility ran above prediction, which is what eventful weekends produce. Oil perpetuals have traded for months, not years, and the report says plainly what the early data can and cannot yet show.

The report sets out the tests, the data behind them, and simulated examples of the hedging economics, and it speaks directly to the CFTC's request for comment on perpetual contracts referencing physical commodities. On the evidence so far, perpetual futures give Americans more tools at no measurable cost to benchmark markets. We plan to keep building that evidence, and will publish additional empirical work as these markets mature. 

[Download the full report (PDF)]