Everyone has the perps convergence backwards
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- Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, argues the perps convergence narrative is backwards — while crypto is said to be moving toward traditional finance, traditional assets are migrating onto the market structure crypto built.
- Real-world-asset perpetual volumes hit a record $211 billion in May 2026, roughly 16x the ~$12 billion recorded in Q4 2025, with equity perps alone climbing 121% month over month to $54 billion, per CoinDesk Research.
- SpaceX shares traded as synthetic pre-IPO perpetuals on Hyperliquid for weeks before its June 2026 listing, with volume swelling to roughly $1.3 billion on debut day as investors shut out of traditional allocations turned to crypto rails.
- Perpetual futures are the deepest and most liquid instrument in crypto, with daily volumes that have approached three-quarters of a trillion dollars and routinely run several times the size of their underlying spot markets.
- A single centralized platform accounted for more than half of all RWA perp volume in May 2026, and 52% of Bitget's users already hold both stocks and crypto.
- Chen estimates tokenization will reshape close to 10% of global capital markets in the years ahead — a shift she describes as "measured in trillions of dollars, not basis points."
Why it matters: Perps are crypto's deepest market, with daily volumes approaching $750 billion and RWA perp volume growing 16x to $211 billion in May 2026. The migration of stocks, commodities, and FX onto crypto rails positions centralized exchanges like Bitget to capture a share of global capital markets that Chen sizes at roughly 10% — measured in trillions, not basis points.
