The reverse bridge: Crypto meets Wall Street using perps

About two years ago, Wall Street began bringing crypto into traditional finance (tradfi), through exchange-traded funds (ETFs), custody, funds and other regulated products. Crypto exchanges are now moving in the other direction, bringing stocks, indexes and commodities onto their platforms through perpetual futures or PERPS.

Crypto exchanges processed $1.32 trillion in perpetual futures tied to traditional assets during the first five months of 2026, compared with $104.21 billion in all of 2025, according to CoinGecko. Monthly volume rose from $230 million in January 2025 to $347.17 billion in May 2026.

Bitget said the growth has changed the makeup of its business.

"A year ago, we didn't even have a perpetual stock product; 100% of our volume came from crypto," said Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget in an interview with CoinDesk. "A year later, we now have about 28% of our total trading volume coming from the stock business, and those are mainly stock perpetuals."

Shunyet Jan, an executive overseeing trading market structure at Binance, said traditional exchanges are now adopting products and trading hours first used by crypto platforms.

"The innovation of perps started in the crypto world," Jan said. "But then it could also migrate over to TradFi."

The move is what some market executives have called the "reverse bridge." Instead of tradfi providing access to crypto, crypto exchanges are offering access to Wall Street markets.

In most cases, the shares themselves are not moving onto crypto exchanges. Stock perps are contracts tied to share prices. They generally do not provide ownership, voting rights or the protections that come with buying shares through a regulated broker. But crypto exchanges are finding demand for contracts that provide exposure to those prices 24/7 without needing to own the actual shares.

One example of this phenomenon was when S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed its S&P 500 benchmark to Trade XYZ, a platform operating natively on the Hyperliquid blockchain. The partnership produced the first officially approved onchain S&P 500 perpetual futures contract, allowing non-U.S. individuals to buy and sell the American equity benchmark 24/7.

Crypto trading platforms have listed about 360 tradfi assets across spot and perps between January 2025 and May 2026, according to the CoinGecko report. The platforms included in the report averaged roughly 75 traditional-asset perps listings each, compared to only 37 spot listings.

Unlike traditional futures, perps on whether an asset's price will rise or fall are without an expiration date. Payments between traders, known as funding rates, help maintain the perp contract close to the price of the asset it tracks.

Beyond the closing bell

For international trading desks, the issue with the traditional stock exchanges' hours of operations goes beyond opening hours.

Institutions already have access to brokerages and over-the-counter trading desks, said Augie Ilag, an investor at CMT Digital. For those firms, the appeal of perps is the ability to adjust or hedge a position without waiting for the U.S. market to open.

"For institutions, this isn't really an access story," Ilag said. "They already have brokerages and OTC desks; the issue is friction."

Retail investors from outside the United States may have a different reason for using the products. Ilag said investors in markets dominated by a small number of local stocks may have no simple way to buy Tesla shares or gain exposure to the S&P 500.

"So it's friction for institutions and genuine access for retail," he said, adding that he had not seen data showing how trading divides between the two groups.

Stock perps remain small compared with traditional equities, the Coingecko report shows, while adding that tokenized stock-perp volume accounted for less than 1% of trading in the underlying stock markets, despite rising from $831 million in July 2025 to $34 billion in May 2026.

Everything under one login

Round-the-clock trading is one part of the plans exchanges have for traditional assets. Coinbase and Binance want customers to trade crypto, stocks and other products through one account, a model both have described as an "everything exchange" or financial super app.

Coinbase is preparing to offer U.K. customers equities and derivatives alongside crypto after securing investment-services authorization from the Financial Conduct Authority under rules based on the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, or MiFID.

The authorization allows Coinbase to offer traditional shares to retail customers and crypto, equity and commodity perps to eligible institutional and advanced traders, the company said.

"Perpetual futures are a core focus of what Coinbase is trying to bring to market," said Keith Grose, U.K. CEO at Coinbase, in an interview with CoinDesk. "We're really focused on being the 'everything exchange.'"

Grose said the longer-term plan is to bring spot crypto, perpetual futures, traditional equities, and eventually tokenized versions of other assets into one place. That could allow customers to use positions across different markets as collateral or borrow against their equities.

Using stocks as collateral

Binance is testing another part of the model by allowing some high-net-worth clients to use tokenized stock positions as collateral for other trades.

"We recognize you could have Nvidia or SpaceX stock, a tokenized version," Jan said. "You could actually have a tokenized stock put on our exchange, and we'll use that as collateral for you to trade something else. It could be a crypto derivative."

Jan said Binance had extended a system that already allowed customers to use crypto as collateral to include traditional assets.

"We have also copied what the U.S. market did in over 40 years in two weeks," Jan said. "But now that's expanded to TradFi assets."

Large funds are not yet placing much long-term risk on decentralized exchanges. Ilag said funds would need clear rules for custody and clearing, protections comparable to central clearing and custody services designed for institutional investors.

"That will take years," Ilag said. "Near term, I'm skeptical of inflows to decentralized venues."

He expects licensed centralized exchanges that settle through crypto systems to attract more institutional business in the near term. Hacks and concerns about smart-contract security remain barriers for decentralized platforms, he said.

"What most people want isn't the ideology of decentralization but a strong product, like a perp on a traditional index, with a license and guarantees behind it," Ilag said.

Crypto exchanges still need benchmark data, licenses, banks, custodians and market makers to offer traditional products.

"The assets are why people show up, as everyone wants the exposure," Ilag said. "The lasting advantage is what this does to market structure."

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