Perpetual Futures Market Growth and Metrics Analysis in 2025-2026

Original author: Prathik Desai

Compiled and organized: BitpushNews

Just when you think finance has become dull and boring, it always brings surprises. Recently, almost everyone seems to be restructuring the financial system in ways few anticipated, including even those from the entertainment and media industries.

Take Jimmy Donaldson, known as "MrBeast" on YouTube, for example: he not only built a snack empire but recently acquired a banking app aimed at teaching financial literacy and money management to teenagers and young adults. Why? Perhaps nothing is more direct than monetizing his 466 million subscriber base through financial products.

This summer, the world's largest derivatives trading market, CME Group, will launch individual stock futures, allowing users to trade futures on more than 50 top U.S. stocks, including Alphabet, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Meta.

These reconstructions show us how people's participation in finance has changed. And in the past few years, nothing illustrates this better than the explosion of the perpetual contracts market.

Perpetual futures (or Perps) are financial derivative contracts that allow market participants to speculate on asset prices without an expiration date. Perps also enable individuals to quickly and inexpensively express views on assets. They are more attractive than traditional markets because they offer instant access and leverage. Unlike traditional markets, they do not require broker onboarding procedures, jurisdictional paperwork, or adherence to conventional market trading hours.

In addition, on-chain perpetual markets allow any asset—whether traditional or crypto—to be traded in a permissionless, highly leveraged manner. This makes speculation intriguing, especially when humans cannot resist betting on the trajectory of volatile assets outside traditional trading hours. This enables risk to be priced in real time.

Think about what happened two weeks ago. When both the traditional and crypto markets crashed simultaneously, traders flocked to Hyperliquid, driving perpetual gold and silver trading into a frenzy. On January 31, Hyperliquid alone accounted for 2% of the global daily silver trading volume on its perpetual silver contract market, which had been live for less than a month.

This explains why the dashboard for perpetual contract trading volume is increasingly dominating the crypto community and forums. Trading volume is an absolute value. It appears large and refreshes every few minutes, making it perfect for leaderboards. But it misses a crucial nuance: trading volume may reflect meaningless movement. A market with high trading volume might have deep liquidity, but it could also be due to rewards and incentives encouraging higher-frequency activity. This activity is typically recursive and lacks meaning.

This week, I thoroughly investigated other indicators of the perpetual trading market. When used in conjunction with trading volume, these indicators add additional dimensions and tell a story entirely different from trading volume alone.

Let's get started.

The perpetual market-friendly user interface has become a low-barrier, default interface for expressing views across various markets and global assets. The wide selection of high-leverage derivatives trading for both traditional and crypto assets on a single platform has led to perpetual contract trading volumes surpassing spot trading volumes on decentralized exchanges. From 44% in February 2025, the share of perpetual contract trading volume has surged to around 75% today (relative to spot trading volume).

This growth has been particularly significant in the past few months:

• Over the four years ending July 31, 2025, the total cumulative perpetual trading volume across all platforms amounted to $6.91 trillion.
• And in just the past six months, this trading volume has doubled to $14 trillion.

All this growth occurred against the backdrop of the total cryptocurrency market cap shrinking by nearly 40% between August 1, 2025, and February 9, 2026. This activity indicates that traders are increasingly favoring derivatives trading, hedging, and short-term positions, especially as the spot market becomes volatile and bearish.

But there is a catch. In such a massive activity, it is easy to misinterpret the trading volume metrics. Especially because perpetual trading is not just about buying assets and holding them long-term; it also involves repeatedly adjusting bet sizes using leverage over shorter time frames.

Therefore, when market turnover rises rapidly, an inevitable question arises in my mind: Does the record-breaking trading volume reflect more capital inflow, or the same capital circulating at a faster pace?

This is the significance of observing Open Interest (OI). If trading volume reflects capital flow, then OI measures the open risk exposure. On perpetual exchanges, OI refers to the total dollar value of active and unsettled long and short contracts held by traders.

If perpetual trading is adopted by the mass market, we not only hope to see greater capital flows but also a proportional increase in open interest.

• In February last year, OI averaged approximately $4 billion;
• This figure has now more than tripled to approximately $13 billion. In fact, the average for the entire month of January reached about $18 billion, then dropped by approximately 30% in the first week of February.

Although open interest increased by about 50% (from $13 billion to approximately $18 billion, then retraced to $13 billion), the perpetual trading volume doubled over the past five months. To better understand this, I examined the trend of capital efficiency (i.e., the percentage of open interest relative to daily trading volume) over the past year.

OI/Volume ratio increased by 50% from 0.33x last year to 0.49x today. However, this progress was not smooth, with multiple peaks and troughs occurring during the 50-basis-point increase in the ratio:

Phase One (February - May 2025): Dormant period. The OI/turnover ratio averaged approximately 0.46x, with average OI at around $4.8 billion and average daily turnover at approximately $11.5 billion.

Phase Two (June - Mid-October): The Leap Period. The ratio averaged approximately 0.72x. During this period, the average OI rose to $14.8 billion, with daily trading volume reaching $23 billion. This not only marked a record-high trading volume but also indicated increased risk exposure and greater capital allocation toward these derivatives.

Phase Three: Market Reversal. This phase began coinciding with the massive liquidation on October 10, which erased over $19 billion in leveraged positions within 24 hours. From mid-October to late December, the OI/turnover ratio declined to ~0.38x, primarily driven by increasing trading volume while open interest remained largely stagnant. October, November, and December recorded the highest three months of trading volume in 2025, averaging over $1.2 trillion per month. During the same period, OI averaged approximately $15 billion, slightly below the average of the previous three months.

Here, I hope to add more dimensions to the perpetual market at the protocol level. This helps us understand how efficiently perpetual exchanges convert trading activity into "sticky capital" and revenue.

As of February 10, the performance of the top five perpetual exchanges by 24-hour trading volume is as follows:

Hyperliquid: Its OI-to-7-day average daily trading volume ratio exceeds 45%, enabling a significant portion of trading volume to be converted into persistent positions. This indicates that for every $10 traded on this platform, $4.5 is allocated to active positions. This is important because a high OI ratio leads to narrower spreads, deeper liquidity, and greater confidence in scaling trades without slippage.

Hyperliquid's fee revenue strengthens this narrative. Its take rate is approximately 3.2 basis points, converting the largest share of 24-hour trading volume into fee revenue.

Aster: Currently ranked second, it has a respectable capital efficiency (OI/Vol) of 34%, despite having trading volume nearly half that of Hyperliquid. However, its monetization is noteworthy—due to a low monetization rate (approximately 1.6 bps), Aster clearly prioritizes capital retention on its platform over maximizing fees.

edgeX and Lighter: Both perform similarly on the capital efficiency ladder, with OI/Vol at 21%. However, edgeX's fee realization is comparable to Hyperliquid at 2.8 bps.

Notably, today's perpetuals market is no longer a simple story of growth; it requires nuanced interpretation of multiple metrics. At a macro level, trading volume has exploded: the cumulative perpetual trading volume over the past six months has surpassed the total of the previous four years. However, the picture only becomes clear when OI and trading volume are read together.

A clearer victory lies in the growth of the OI/turnover ratio. This is a direct signal that "patient capital" is willing to trust and bet on the various products and markets emerging in perpetual exchanges.

What will be more worth paying attention to in the future is how individual players will evolve from here and what they choose to optimize. Over time, exchanges that can optimize "conviction" and achieve sustainable monetization will be far more important than platforms that merely dominate trading volume rankings through rewards and incentives.