HTX Research｜From Stocks to Chains: Perpetual Contracts Reshape Global Equity Trading

1. Product Architecture and Evolutionary Logic of the Tokenized Stock Market

The true paradigm shift in the tokenized stock market occurred between 2023 and 2025, driven by the maturation of three key variables. First, the maturity of on-chain perpetual contract mechanisms—GMX's GLP pool model, dYdX v4's order book architecture, and Hyperliquid's dedicated L1 engine built on Arbitrum Stylus—reduced on-chain derivatives latency to milliseconds while offering round-the-clock, uninterrupted trading capabilities impossible on traditional centralized exchanges, thanks to built-in oracles and liquidation engines. Second, a transformative upgrade in oracle infrastructure—Chainlink Data Streams and the Pyth Network enabled Asian stock prices to be recorded on-chain with sub-second latency, resolving the long-standing issue of price source reliability for tokenized financial products. Third, the initial formation of a regulatory framework—the SEC signaled positive momentum from late 2025 to early 2026, preparing to introduce an "Innovation Exemption" to provide a regulatory sandbox path for compliant tokenized products; Coinbase officially launched four CFTC-regulated stock index perpetual contracts (AI10, China10, Defense10, Tech100) on June 8, 2026, marking the formal entry of regulated entities into this arena.

From a product structure perspective, the current market consists of two distinct but complementary product types. The first type is fully collateralized spot tokenization, represented by Ondo Finance, xStocks, and Backed. Ondo Finance holds an absolute lead with a TVL of $887.8 million, commanding a 60.87% market share and covering 231 stocks; xStocks ranks second with a TVL of $394.2 million, holding a 27.03% share. The core value of these products lies in cross-border investment accessibility and settlement efficiency—investors can hold global stocks without opening local brokerage accounts, and on-chain settlement shortens T+2 to T+0. 

The second type is perpetual contracts, represented by Hyperliquid, Binance, and dYdX. These products do not hold the actual stocks but only use stablecoins as margin to track the price of the underlying asset. Their greatest advantages are 24/7 trading, leverage of up to 20x, and the ability to list assets rapidly without needing to custody the underlying asset. A typical example: following the Hyperliquid community's approval of HIP-3 in October 2025, it successively listed Korean blue-chip stock perpetuals like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, triggering a "wave of tokenized stock contract listings" centered on the Asian market, which Binance quickly followed by listing similar products.

2. Market Structure Reconstruction and Competitive Landscape Driven by Perpetuals

The competitive landscape for tokenized stock perpetuals in 2026 presents a clear three-tier structure: a dominant layer of on-chain protocols, a catching-up layer of centralized exchanges, and a gradually entering layer of institutions. Leveraging its proprietary L1 chain's ultra-low latency and zero gas fees, Hyperliquid captures approximately 50% of the trading volume in the perpetuals market. Its core strategy can be summarized as "geographical arbitrage"—prioritizing coverage of high-liquidity Asian markets like Korea and Japan, building liquidity moats during local exchange off-hours to attract speculators and hedgers from global time zones. Binance, as the world's largest crypto trading platform, accelerated its expansion of tokenized stock perpetuals product lines in late 2025, forming a duopoly with Hyperliquid. The average price difference for the same underlying asset between the two platforms ranges from 0.93% to 1.03%, reaching a maximum of 2.3% under extreme market conditions. This reflects both the insufficient competition among market makers and creates a natural environment for arbitrage.

Coinbase, relying on its CFTC regulatory license, follows a "compliant alternative" path, offering the first regulated on-chain stock derivatives gateway for US institutional investors. The four index perpetuals it launched in June 2026 (AI10, China10, Defense10, Tech100) adopt a central clearing model, with every transaction undergoing KYC verification and anti-money laundering screening, starkly contrasting with Hyperliquid's decentralized, permissionless model. dYdX v4, built as an independent application chain on the Cosmos SDK, focuses on institutional-grade order books and cross-chain interoperability; GMX's GLP model offers more flexibility for listing and providing liquidity for smaller underlying assets. Tracking the evolution of competitive focus, the market is shifting from "who lists first" to "who prices most accurately"—oracle latency, market maker depth, and liquidation mechanisms have become the three pillars determining platform competitiveness. Empirical research shows that the correlation coefficient between perpetual contract prices and the next day's opening price for the underlying stock is as high as 0.85 to 0.89, with regression coefficients of 0.93 and 1.00 respectively. This means tokenized stock perpetuals are no longer merely a passive price tracking tool but are evolving into an independent information aggregation and price discovery mechanism operating outside traditional exchanges.

3. On-Chain Data Evidence: The Triple Value Creation of Perpetuals

The fundamental reason for the widespread interest in tokenized stock perpetuals is the triple unique value they create that traditional stock markets cannot offer. The first value is overnight price discovery functionality. Systematic research on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix perpetuals reveals that the post-market performance of both assets systematically leads the next day's opening price. Specifically, if the Samsung Electronics perpetual shows an upward trend after the KOSPI closes, the probability of a higher opening the next day is about 82%; conversely, a downward trend predicts a lower opening with a probability as high as 96%. Data for SK Hynix is equally striking, with an upward trend predicting a higher opening with 95% probability and a downward trend predicting a lower opening with 78% probability. More critically, regression coefficient analysis shows values of 0.93 and 1.00, indicating that overnight perpetuals can not only predict the direction of the next day's open but also quite accurately estimate the magnitude of the opening gap. This information aggregation ability stems from the 24/7 operation of on-chain markets—global macro news, corporate announcements, and industry developments are reflected in perpetual prices in real-time, without waiting for the next trading day's opening auction.

The second value is the funding rate-driven Delta-neutral arbitrage mechanism. The funding rate mechanism in perpetuals naturally transfers value between longs and shorts—when market sentiment is bullish, longs pay funding to shorts, and vice versa. Data shows the Samsung Electronics perpetual generates an average intraday positive premium of about 0.15%, and SK Hynix about 0.23%. Theoretically, constructing a Delta-neutral strategy—buying fully collateralized spot tokens while simultaneously shorting an equivalent notional amount of perpetuals—can completely eliminate directional exposure and achieve an annualized return of 66.7% to 119.7% solely from funding rates. In practice, factors like slippage costs, basis risk, and capital efficiency compress theoretical returns, but it's already attractive enough to draw professional market makers and quant hedge funds into large-scale deployments. The third value is the structural opportunity for cross-exchange arbitrage. Due to the same underlying assets being listed on multiple independently operated platforms without a unified clearing mechanism, the average price spread for Samsung Electronics perpetuals between Binance and Hyperliquid is maintained at 0.93%, reaching a maximum of 2.3% during extreme periods. Especially during nights and weekends when on-chain liquidity decreases due to spot market closures, the spread widens further, creating a cyclical profit window for arbitrageurs with multi-platform access capabilities.

4. Four Directions of Innovation Trends and Business Opportunities

The rapid expansion of the tokenized stock perpetuals market is spawning four innovative directions with independent commercial value. The first direction is specialized market maker services. Unlike the monopoly of franchise market makers in traditional finance, on-chain perpetual market making is open to any participant with sufficient capital and technical skills. The current fragmented pricing of the same asset across multiple platforms naturally widens spreads during nights and weekends to 0.15% to 0.75%, creating a continuous and highly predictable profit space for professional market makers. The second direction is regionalized oracle services. The price discovery needs for Asian market stocks outside of New York and London trading hours are creating a new niche oracle market—oracle service providers capable of delivering high-frequency, multi-layer verified pricing data during Asian stock market off-hours will become key infrastructure providers for this track. The third direction is tokenization issuance intermediary services. Currently, many underlying assets in the KOSPI 200, Nikkei 225, and Hang Seng Index have not yet been tokenized. A one-stop "Issuance-as-a-Service" platform that provides compliant connectivity, asset custody, pricing parameter setting, and liquidity guidance between traditional securities issuers and on-chain trading platforms has vast market potential. The fourth direction is basis-driven on-chain hedge funds. Compared to traditional basis trading, the on-chain perpetual version offers unique advantages: faster capital turnover (no securities settlement cycle) and multiple yield sources from cross-platform spreads. Professional hedge funds can dynamically allocate positions across multiple platforms to achieve high-frequency turnover and amplify returns.

From a broader industrial perspective, Coinbase's listing of CFTC-regulated index perpetuals marks the beginning of US regulators formally classifying this new financial product. The Basel Committee restarted its review of bank crypto-asset exposure rules in November 2025. Once banks are permitted to hold tokenized stock exposure, the liquidity in this entire track will experience exponential growth. 4Pillars Research predicts that if 1% of the global stock market capitalization were tokenized, the market size could reach $1.34 trillion by 2030, while current penetration is less than one hundred-thousandth of a percent.

5. Risk Framework and Investment Strategies

Despite its rapid growth, the tokenized stock perpetuals market has a complex and multi-layered risk structure. Smart contract risk is the most direct technical threat—between 2024 and 2025, losses from oracle attacks, liquidation logic vulnerabilities, and front-end manipulation in perpetual protocol-class protocols exceeded $500 million. The most cautionary event was the liquidation mechanism flaw exposed by the Hyperliquid JELLY token incident in February 2025, causing actual losses for some users involuntarily. On the market risk side, high leverage amplifies potential returns but also exponentially increases liquidation risk—low liquidity environments during earnings seasons or major policy events can trigger cascading liquidations, leading to price crashes. Liquidity fragmentation risk constitutes a third-dimensional systemic threat—perpetual contracts for the same asset, like Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix, trade on multiple independent platforms with their own pricing, lacking a unified clearing coordination mechanism. In extreme market conditions, this could lead to large and persistent price distortions between parallel markets.

Regulatory uncertainty is the biggest external variable. National stances diverge significantly on this issue: the US CLARITY Act's legislative progress, while proposing a safe harbor provision for DeFi developers, has faced overall setbacks; the EU's MiCA framework has not yet clarified its specific coverage of on-chain stock derivatives; Hong Kong and Singapore, as Asian financial hubs, have not issued specific regulatory guidelines for tokenized stocks; Japan's Financial Services Agency's cautious approach to crypto derivatives may also limit the product's promotion speed in its market.

Based on the above risk framework, investment strategies can be constructed from three dimensions. The first dimension is a platform token allocation strategy—the HYPE token is highly correlated with Hyperliquid's trading volume due to its 30% fee buyback and burn mechanism, while ONDO and DYDX represent core beta plays for leading RWA track protocols and decentralized derivatives infrastructure, respectively. The second dimension is an ecosystem participation strategy—quant teams can deploy automated trading systems based on funding rate arbitrage and cross-platform spread arbitrage; retail investors can use overnight price discovery to optimize next-day trading decisions for traditional stocks, with empirical data showing auxiliary decision-making can improve the win rate of short-term Asian market strategies by approximately 7 to 12 percentage points. The third dimension is a Gamma market-making strategy—providing liquidity on multiple exchanges simultaneously while automatically hedging exposure to earn bid-ask spreads, and using periodic directional funding rate returns to boost overall yield. Key risk monitoring indicators should focus on three time-sensitive events: the legal implications of the Roman Storm trial verdict in the second half of 2026 on defining developer liability boundaries in DeFi; whether the CLARITY Act achieves substantive legislative progress in Congress; and the specific compliance requirements for the Travel Rule in DeFi scenarios during the next FATF standard revision.

6. Conclusion and Future Outlook

The true historical significance of tokenized stock perpetuals lies in their attempt to answer the most central question since the birth of blockchain technology: Can on-chain finance transcend the narrow scope of "crypto's on-chain finance" and truly become "on-chain finance for all assets"? The 85% price consistency and regression coefficients of 0.93 to 1.00 for the Samsung Electronics perpetual provide strong evidence that on-chain derivatives can not only effectively track the price movements of traditional assets but also independently perform effective price discovery and information aggregation during traditional market off-hours. From an investment clock perspective, the period from the second half of 2026 to 2027 is identified as a key catalytic window for this track. The market reaction to Coinbase's regulated index perpetuals, whether the SEC's "Innovation Exemption" is formally implemented, and whether Hyperliquid can maintain its market share leadership in on-chain perpetuals—these three monitoring indicators will serve as a core reference system for judging whether the tokenized stock market can transition from an experimental phase to the mainstream. For investors with sufficient risk tolerance, the vast gap between the current penetration rate of less than 0.01% of global stock market capitalization and a compound growth rate exceeding 200% presents a classic early-stage track investment landscape—high reward potential coexists with high uncertainty. Participation should focus on filtering investment targets using the benchmarks of controllable underlying risks, traceable compliance paths, and verifiable technological iteration.