Don't just stare at the volume of the deal
Original title: Reading Perps Beyond Volume
Original by Prathik Desai, Token Dispatch
Original: Bitpush News
It's always a surprise when you think it's boring. In recent times, it seems that everyone is reshaping the financial system in a less predictable manner, even those from the entertainment and media industries。
In the case of Jimmy Donaldson, “MrBeest” on YouTube, not only does he own a snack empire, but he has recently acquired a bank application designed to spread financial literacy and fund management among young people and young people. Why? Perhaps nothing is more direct than using financial products to cash out 466 million subscribers。
This summer, the world's largest derivatives trading market, CME Group, will launch a stock future that will allow users to trade over 50 top American futures, including Alphabet, NVIDIA, Tesla and Meta。
These restructurings have shown us how people are participating in finance. In the past few years, there has been nothing more telling than the outbreak of the Perpetual Markets market。
Revolving futures (or Perps) are financial derivatives contracts that allow market participants to speculate on asset prices without maturity. Perps also enables people to express their views on assets quickly and cheaply. They are more attractive than traditional markets because they provide immediate access and leverage. Unlike traditional markets, they do not require the presence of brokers, do not have regulatory work in jurisdictions and do not follow “traditional” market hours。
In addition, a chain-lasting market allows any asset (whether traditional or encrypted) to be traded in a highly leveraged manner without a licence. This makes speculation interesting, especially when human beings cannot resist playing the trajectory of volatile assets outside the traditional trading period. This allows for real-time pricing of risks。
Think about what happened two weeks ago. When both traditional and encrypted markets collapse, traders rush to Hyperliquid, pushing the perpetuation of gold and silver trade into fanaticism. On 31 January, the Hyperliquid family alone accounted for 2 per cent of global silver day transactions in its permanent contract market for less than a month。
This explains why the dashboard for the renewal of contractual transactions is increasingly leading encrypted communities and forums. The volume of the transaction is an absolute value. It looks big. It's refreshed every few minutes. It's perfect for a high ranking. But it missed a key nuance: the volume of transactions may reflect a meaningless movement. The volume of transactions in a market may be large because of sufficient depth, but also because incentives and incentives encourage activities with higher frequency. Such activities are usually retrogressive and have little significance。
This week, I studied in depth other indicators of the market for ever-ending transactions. When these indicators are used in conjunction with the volume of transactions, they add more dimensions and tell stories that are completely different from simply the volume of transactions。
Let's get started。
Several data points
A continuous market-friendly user interface makes it a low-threshold, default interface across markets and global asset expression. The extensive choice of highly leveraged derivatives transactions on a single platform for traditional and encrypted assets has led to the renewal of contracts exceeding the off-the-shelf transactions on de-centre trading platforms. From 44% in February 2025, the share of long-term contracts has soared to about 75% today (relative to spot transactions)。
This increase has been particularly significant in the past few months:
The cumulative total of the permanent transactions of the entire platform over a four-year period ending on 31 July 2025 is $691 trillion。
• In the last six months alone, the volume of this trade has doubled to $14 trillion。
All these increases took place against the backdrop of a decline of nearly 40 per cent in the total market value of encrypted currencies between 1 August 2025 and 9 February 2026. This dynamism shows that traders are increasingly inclined towards derivatives trading, hedging and short-term positioning, especially when spot markets become volatile and declining。
But here's a trap. In such a large activity, transaction volume indicators are easily misinterpreted. In particular, long-term holdings are not limited to purchases of assets, but include the use of leverage to resize investments over a shorter time frame。
Therefore, when the market rate is rising rapidly, a problem inevitably emerges in my mind: Is the record volume of transactions reflecting more capital inflows or is the same capital revolving at a faster pace
That's the point of observing the amount of storage. If the volume of transactions reflects capital flows, OI measures an open risk. On a permanent trading platform, OI refers to the total dollar value of active and open multiple and empty contracts held by traders。
If a lasting deal is accepted by the mass market, we not only want to see greater capital flows, but also to see an open window of proportional growth。
• LAST FEBRUARY, OI AVERAGED ABOUT $4 BILLION
• This figure has now more than tripled to about $13 billion. In fact, the average for the entire month of January reached about $18 billion, and then fell by about 30 per cent in the first week of February。
DESPITE THE DOUBLING OF THE TURNOVER OVER THE PAST FIVE MONTHS, OI GREW BY ABOUT 50 PER CENT (FROM $13 BILLION TO ABOUT $18 BILLION, THEN BACK TO $13 BILLION). IN ORDER TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THAT, I OBSERVEDCAPITAL EFFICIENCY (I.E. OO AS A PERCENTAGE OF DAILY TRANSACTIONS)The trend over the past year。
The ratio of OI/transactions jumped from 0.33x last year to 50% to 0.49x today. However, this progress has not been smooth, and the growth of the ratio of 50 basis points has been accompanied by multiple waves and valleys:
• Phase I (February-May 2025): Silence period. On average, the OC/Traction ratio is about 0.46x, the average OO is about $4.8 billion and the average daily turnover is about $11.5 billion。
• Phase II (June-mid-October): Jumping period. The ratio averaged about 0.72 x. During this period, the average OC rose to $14.8 billion, with an average daily turnover of $23 billion. This not only marks an all-time high in trade, but also an increase in risk exposure and greater capital investment in these derivatives。
:: Phase III: Market reversal. The beginning of this phase coincided with the mass explosion of October 10, which wiped out more than $19 billion in leverage positions in 24 hours. From mid-October to late December, the OI/transaction ratio declined to ~0.38x, mainly driven by the growth of trade volumes, while the holding stock remained largely stagnant. In October, November and December, the highest three-month turnover in 2025 averaged more than $1.2 trillion a month. Over the same period, OI averaged about $15 billion, slightly below the average of the previous three months。
Agreement level
Here, I would like to add more dimensions at the level of agreements to the sustainable market. This helps us to understand how efficient it is for a sustainable trading platform to convert trading activities into " sticky capital" and revenue。
As of 10 February, the following is the performance of the permanent trading platform, which ranks the top five in the 24-hour trading volume:
• Hyperliquid: Its ratio of OI to 7-day average daily transactions exceeds 45 per cent and can translate a large share of transactions into a permanent position. This indicates that for every $10 traded on the platform, $4.5 is invested in active positions. This is important because high OC rates can lead to narrower margins, deeper liquidity and greater confidence in the scale of transactions without a slide point。
• The collection of fees from Hyperliquid reinforced the story. The rate of realization (Take Rate) is about 3.2 basis points and is converting the maximum 24-hour transaction volume into fee income。
• Aster: currently ranked second, with 34 per cent of good capital efficiency (OI/Vol), although trade volume is almost half Hyperliquid. However, its liquidity is a matter of concern - Aster apparently gives priority to capital retention on its platform rather than maximizing the process costs because of the low liquidity rate (approximately 1.6 bps)。
• EdgeX and Lighter: both perform similarly on the capital efficiency ladder, both 21 per cent. However, EdgeX is equivalent to Hyperliquid in terms of the liquidation of fees, which is 2.8 bps。
Summary
IT IS REMARKABLE THAT TODAY ' S SUSTAINABLE CONTRACT MARKET IS NO LONGER A SIMPLE GROWTH STORY, AND THAT IT REQUIRES A DETAILED READING OF MULTIPLE INDICATORS. AT THE MACRO LEVEL, THERE HAS BEEN AN EXPLOSIVE INCREASE IN THE VOLUME OF TRANSACTIONS: THE CUMULATIVE AND LASTING INCREASE IN TRANSACTIONS OVER A PERIOD OF SIX MONTHS EXCEEDS THE SUM OF THE PREVIOUS FOUR YEARS. BUT IT ONLY BECOMES CLEAR WHEN OI AND TRADE VOLUMES ARE READ TOGETHER。
MORE CLEARLY, THE VICTORY LIES IN THE GROWTH OF THE OO/TRANSACTION RATIO. THIS IS A DIRECT SIGNAL OF THE WILLINGNESS OF " PATIENT CAPITAL" TO TRUST AND BET ON THE VARIOUS PRODUCTS AND MARKETS THAT APPEAR ON THE PLATFORM OF THE PERMANENT TRADING。
More important in the future is how individual players will evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, those trading platforms that optimize "business confidence" and achieve sustainable liquidity will be much more important than those that simply rely on incentives and incentives to rank high on the trading roll。
