Perp: The Financial Weapon of Gen Z, Fighting an Era That Never Dawns

In a rented room in Seoul's Gangnam district, a 27-year-old programmer stares at his computer screen late into the night.

He's not gaming. On the screen flickers the position page of Hyperliquid, a long ETH perpetual contract with 20x leverage and a margin worth three months of his salary. He did the math: given current housing prices in Seoul and his salary level, saving every penny, it would take about thirty years to buy an average apartment. But in thirty years, he'll be fifty-seven.

He's not an isolated case. He represents a generation.

In early 2025, over 16.2 million South Koreans held crypto accounts, about 32% of the country's total population, surpassing the number of stock account holders. Within just weeks of Trump's election victory, over 500,000 South Koreans opened new crypto trading accounts. One observation of this group describes it this way: Seoul's youth are acting with concentrated bets and high leverage, with hundreds of thousands of accounts moving in roughly synchronized rhythms, creating a market impact that no single institutional investor can match.

You could call it a gambling culture, but it's also the rationality of desperation.

The same story is being told in a different language on the other side of the planet.

In Lagos, the purchasing power of the Naira is evaporating visibly. In March 2025, following a sudden currency devaluation, on-chain transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa surged to nearly $25 billion in a single month, against a backdrop of general contraction elsewhere in the world. About one-third of Nigerian adults hold or use cryptocurrency, making it the country with the highest adoption rate globally. For many Nigerians, this isn't speculation. It's the only trustworthy store of value in a nation where even having a bank account is a challenge.

In Mumbai, the participation rate of Indian retail investors in the derivatives market skyrocketed from 2% in 2018 to 41% in 2025. The number of trading accounts surged from 36 million to 154 million within five years. SEBI's study of nearly 10 million individual stock derivatives traders shows that over 40% are under 30, and more than three-quarters have an annual income equivalent to less than 50,000 RMB. They use their extremely limited income buffers for high-leverage trading and can't stop, regardless of regulatory warnings.

Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai—these are microcosms of the world. Young people everywhere are converging on the same instrument: Perpetual Contracts.

This isn't just a crypto industry story. It's a global collective action, driven by structural inequality, where young people use leveraged tools to fight against the era's intense competition.

A Genius Idea, Waiting Thirty Years

The Perpetual Contract (commonly known as 'Perp' in the industry) wasn't an invention of the crypto industry.

In 1993, Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller formally proposed this concept. In his design, it was an ultimate cash-settled instrument with no expiration date, capable of tracking the long-term value of illiquid assets. It was initially designed to hedge against real estate price risk.

However, this idea was born before its time. The machinery of traditional finance was too heavy. Wall Street built an enormous system around fixed expiration dates, batch settlements, and centralized clearing. That old machine, driven by paper documents and layers of intermediaries, was inherently resistant to the flexibility of "never settling." Shiller's idea lay dormant in academic journals for over twenty years. No one had the capability or the incentive to implement it.

Until 2016, when Arthur Hayes of BitMEX introduced perpetual contracts to cryptocurrency.

In those two years, BitMEX rapidly rose from the periphery to become an industry powerhouse, fueled by perpetual contracts.

The secret wasn't Bitcoin itself, but the liberation of one of humanity's oldest impulses: directional bets with leverage. No expiration dates, no Greeks, no rollovers, no exercise. Only one judgment remains: up or down, and by how many times.

a16z venture partner Jay Drain, in a recent widely-discussed report, defined the essence of this: "The perpetual contract strips away all the complexity of options. No need to choose a strike price, no need to manage expiration, no need to worry about time decay eating a correct directional bet. It retains only one thing: a pure bet on price direction. The explosive growth of 0DTE options has already proven the scale of this demand."

The 0DTE he refers to is another exploding product in the US stock market: Zero Days to Expiration options. In 2025, 0DTE SPX options averaged a daily volume of 2.3 million contracts, up 51% year-over-year, accounting for 59% of total S&P 500 options volume. Retail investors make up 50% to 60% of this volume.

No waiting, no complexity. Just leverage, right now.

Perp simply takes this demand to its extreme.

The numbers are the most honest testament to this evolution. In 2025, the total trading volume of perpetual contracts on centralized exchanges reached $86.2 trillion, up 47% year-over-year; the growth of on-chain DEX perpetual contracts was even more astonishing, with an annual volume of $6.7 trillion, up 346% year-over-year. Perpetual contracts now account for over 70% of all centralized crypto trading volume and approximately 78% of all crypto derivatives volume.

The notional trading volume of Bitcoin perpetual contracts exceeds Bitcoin spot trading volume by roughly six times.

This market structure, where derivatives dominate pricing, has never been seen in any traditional asset class like gold, crude oil, or even the S&P 500.

Dopamine, Tribes, and PNL: Trading Becomes a Lifestyle

The crazy spring of 2021 is the starting point for understanding all of this.

Robinhood, with its colorful interface and zero-commission slogan, simplified complex financial games into a swipe-and-play mobile game. This product design collided with the historical vacuum of global lockdowns: tens of millions of young people, armed with government stimulus checks, were deprived of traditional outlets for gambling and thrill-seeking like sports events, casinos, and bars. The stock market became the world's largest, only open arena.

Retail investors on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets discovered hedge fund Melvin Capital's massive short position on GME. They mobilized via social media and used call options to drive the stock price up dozens of times, forcing a top Wall Street hedge fund to capitulate and seek a bailout.

The GME event declared one thing to the world: Retail investors discovered that through derivatives leverage, they could directly rewrite pricing logic.

But GME was just a trigger point; something deeper was already formed.

Modern trading apps are increasingly designed like games: real-time flickering numbers, flashing red and green colors, confirmation beeps when a trade executes. This is essentially a high-frequency feedback dopamine system. In the past, trading required turning on a computer and reading research reports. Now, on the subway, on the toilet, or waiting in line for coffee, a swipe on the phone completes a bet. When the barrier to entry for trading is low enough, it becomes a fragmented pastime, just like scrolling through short videos or playing mobile games.

PNL (Profit & Loss statements) have become a new kind of business card. Profit screenshots are proof of "skill," while self-deprecating posts about losses are "authentic" social currency. In Discord channels or on X, this real-time financial volatility is more impactful than any static life photo. People buying the same Meme coin naturally form a community of shared interest. The emotional bond of "getting rich together" or "going to zero together" is much stronger than a simple shared hobby.

Thus, trading became a daily social activity and lifestyle for a new generation of young people.

And among all trading tools, the perpetual contract is the most perfect dopamine delivery vehicle.

It lacks the complexity of options and the expiration anxiety of futures. It only has positions, leverage, and unrealized P&L visible at any time. It perfectly aligns with this generation's sense of time—not three-year holds, not quarterly reviews, but now, tonight, the next couple of hours.

Derivative tools originally designed for risk management in traditional finance are being weaponized by a new generation of retail investors for directional betting. Perp, with its extremely simple design and fast, intense trading rhythm, perfectly matches this demand.

A Class Barrier Hidden for Two Centuries

However, the significance of perpetual contracts extends far beyond "lower-barrier gambling."

It's breaking down a much older wall.

For a long time, the restricted trading hours of traditional stock markets represented a subtle class barrier. Academic research reveals a startling fact: due to the so-called "overnight drift" effect, a disproportionate share of long-term returns in the US stock market occurs outside regular trading hours. Earnings releases and major news are typically deliberately scheduled outside market hours. Retail investors are locked into the 9-to-5 window, forced to watch helplessly as prices gap at the opening bell—profits that should have been theirs are already reaped by institutions with access to extended-hours trading.

The data coldly confirms this. If, between 2019 and 2022, you bought the high-volatility retail favorite AMC at the open each day and sold at the close, your principal would have been nearly wiped out, losing 99.6%. But if you held it only overnight during the same period, the return would have been a staggering 30,000%.

This isn't a story about luck. It's about the structurally uneven distribution of information rights, time rights, and pricing power—an imbalance that has existed for two hundred years.

On-chain perpetual contract platforms are currently perhaps the only infrastructure globally that can truly break down this wall.

This is no longer just a theoretical concept. In March this year, during the panic following the Iranian attack over a weekend, while major global stock exchanges were closed and retail investors could only anxiously scroll social media, Hyperliquid's crude oil perpetual contract saw $1 billion in trading volume within 24 hours.

Hyperliquid gaining popularity among a new generation of traders on Instagram

Simultaneously, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and Nasdaq have announced plans to launch 7x24 round-the-clock trading services. That wall of restricted trading hours, standing for two centuries, is being dismantled from both sides.

The Endgame of RWA: Everything Can Be a Perp

In the past, perp traders were limited to betting on crypto assets—BTC, ETH, SOL, and a long list of altcoins.

This boundary is disappearing.

Starting in the second half of 2025, despite the overall crypto market entering a downturn, RWA (Real World Asset) perpetual contracts have risen against the trend. Several DEXs have already launched commodity, stock, and index contracts, expanding tradable assets to include NVIDIA, Samsung, SpaceX, and commodities like silver and palladium.

Recently, RWA assets briefly accounted for 44% of Hyperliquid's total trading volume, consistently ranking among the highest revenue-generating trading pairs on the platform. Every weekend when traditional markets close,Hyperliquid's on-chain crude oil perpetual contract becomes the sole functioning crude oil pricing machine in the world.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ twice

This is a paradigm shift happening right now.

In its latest outlook report, a16z explicitly states: Synthetic products (like perpetual contracts) offer deeper liquidity and are a more crypto-native RWA solution than simple tokenization. Essentially, this is a historic choice between "Perpetual Contracts vs. Tokenization," and the answer is becoming clear.

Coinbase Institutional Research puts it even more directly: Given the long-term trend of global retail participation in US stocks, stock perpetual contracts have the potential to become the preferred tool for a new generation of retail traders, offering both 24/7 access and capital efficiency.

Capital has already sensed this direction.

On April 28, 2026, crypto derivatives platform Liquid announced the completion of an $18 million Series A funding round, co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital, with participation from Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, and others. Previously, the company had closed a $7.6 million seed round led by Paradigm, bringing total funding to $25.6 million.

Liquid was founded by Franklyn Wang, a former Two Sigma quantitative researcher and Harvard graduate. He is 25 years old. The company started as a simple perpetual contract aggregator, integrating on-chain derivatives exchanges like Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Ostium into a single interface. It has now expanded to stocks, forex, commodities, and prediction markets, supporting over 500 trading instruments, including positions from Polymarket, with leverage up to 200x.

Hundreds of millions of young people around the world are waiting for a tool simple enough to let them bet on the direction of the world with minimal friction.

And the brightest minds in traditional finance are also gravitating towards Perp.

Regulation Opens Up, On-Chain Never Gets Dark

In April 2026, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig announced in a public speech that the regulatory body would establish a complete regulatory framework for perpetual contracts in the "near term" within the United States.

His exact words were: "The previous administration failed to create a path for these markets to exist onshore. Under my leadership, the CFTC will use every available tool to bring perpetual contracts and other novel derivatives onshore, allowing them to flourish in both centralized and decentralized markets."

This is almost an open declaration of intent.

Global exchanges are already racing to get ahead. Kraken's parent company acquired Bitnomial, which holds a perpetual contract license, for a staggering $550 million; Coinbase launched a long-term futures product closely resembling a perpetual contract; Robinhood announced it is introducing perp for US users; Polymarket and Kalshi have announced their entry into the perpetual contract space. Even since Robinhood launched its prediction market, that product line traded 11 billion contracts throughout 2025 with over one million active users—the fastest-growing revenue line in the platform's history.

Before this, the primary market for perp was on offshore platforms outside the US, where young people from Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, and São Paulo, fueled by the anxiety of currency devaluation, leveraged their bets on the direction of the world.

The official opening of the US market means that the world's deepest liquidity pool and the most participatory financial instrument of this era will meet on the same stage.

An on-chain trading platform Hyperliquid, founded in 2022, now sees daily trading volumes that can challenge top-tier centralized exchanges. A perpetual contract aggregator like Liquid, launched only in August 2025, processed $3 billion in trading volume within eight months and just completed a Series A round led by top venture capital firms.

They are all built on the same premise: Gen Z doesn't want to wait for markets to open, doesn't want to fill out account opening paperwork, doesn't want to pay for the layers of hurdles traditional finance sets up to "protect" them. What they want is now, leverage, and any asset with a story, available in any time zone.

In late 18th-century New York, anyone could become a stockbroker. There were no tickers or fixed trading floors. Trades often happened under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, serving as a central meeting point. Brokers and merchants bought and sold stocks and government bonds there. Trading hours were simply "when everyone was around." When it got dark, people dispersed, and trading stopped.

Today, that tree has grown on-chain, and it never gets dark.