Perp: The Financial Weapon of Gen Z Against a Never-Dawning Era

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

He isn't gaming. On the screen flickers the position page of Hyperliquid, a long position on an ETH perpetual contract with 20x leverage, the margin representing three months' worth of his savings. He's done a different calculation: at Seoul's current housing prices and his salary level, saving every penny without spending, it would take him about thirty years to buy an average apartment. But then, he would be fifty-seven years old.

He is not an isolated case; he represents a generation.

In early 2025, over 16.2 million South Koreans held crypto accounts, roughly 32% of the country's total population, surpassing the number holding stock accounts. Within just a few weeks of Trump's election victory, over 500,000 South Koreans opened new crypto trading accounts. One observation describes this group: 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 unmatched by any single institutional investor.

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

The same story plays out in a different language on the other side of the globe.

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 in other global regions. 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 owning 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. A SEBI study of nearly 10 million individual stock derivatives traders showed that over 40% are under 30, and more than three-quarters earn an annual income equivalent to less than 50,000 RMB. They are using extremely limited income buffers for high-leverage trading, unable to stop despite repeated warnings from regulators.

Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai — a microcosm of the world. Young people today are converging on the same tool: perpetual contracts.

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

A Genius Idea, Waiting Thirty Years

The perpetual contract is not an invention of the crypto industry.

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

However, the idea was born at the wrong time. The machinery of traditional finance was too cumbersome. Wall Street had built a massive system around fixed maturity dates, batch settlements, and centralized clearing. That old machine, driven by paper documents and layers of intermediaries, inherently resisted the flexibility of "never settling." Shiller's idea lay dormant in academic journals for over twenty years, with neither the capability nor the motivation to implement it.

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

In those following two years, BitMEX rapidly rose from the fringes to become an industry powerhouse, powered by perpetual contracts.

The secret wasn't Bitcoin itself, but the liberation of a most ancient human impulse: directional betting with leverage. No expiry, no Greeks, no rollovers, no exercise. Only one judgment remains: up or down, and by how many multiples.

In his recently widely discussed report, a16z Investment Partner Jay Drain defined the essence of this in one sentence: "Perpetual contracts strip away all the complexity of options. You don't need to choose a strike price, manage expiration, or worry about time decay eating away a correct directional view. It retains only one thing: a pure bet on price movement. 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, average daily volume of 0DTE SPX options reached 2.3 million contracts, up 51% year-over-year, accounting for 59% of all S&P 500 options volume. Retail investors constitute 50% to 60% of this trading volume.

No waiting, no complexity, just: Give me leverage now.

Perp 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 on-chain DEX perpetuals was even more staggering, with annual volume reaching $6.7 trillion, a 346% increase year-over-year. Perpetual contracts now account for over 70% of all centralized crypto trading volume and roughly 78% of all crypto derivatives trading volume.

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

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

Dopamine, Tribes, and PNL: Trading as 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 swiping game on a phone. This product design collided with the historic vacuum of global lockdowns: tens of millions of young people, holding government stimulus checks, had lost traditional arenas for games like sports, casinos, and bars. The stock market became the world's largest, only 24/7 arena.

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

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

But GME was just a trigger; the deeper currents were already formed.

Modern trading apps are increasingly designed like games: real-time flickering numbers, flashing red and green colors, confirmation sounds upon execution. This is essentially a high-frequency feedback dopamine system. In the past, trading required turning on a computer and reading research reports; now, a bet can be placed with a swipe of a phone while on the subway, on the toilet, or waiting in line for coffee. When the barrier to trading drops low enough, it becomes a fragmented pastime, just like scrolling through short videos or playing mobile games.

PNL (Profit and Loss) has become the new business card. Profitable P&L screenshots are proof of "skill"; self-deprecating posts about losses are "authentic" social currency. On Discord channels or X, this real-time financial volatility is far more impactful than any static life photo. People buying the same Meme coin naturally form communities of shared interest; the emotional bond of "getting rich together" or "going to zero together" is much stronger than simple shared hobbies.

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

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

It has none of the complexity of options, none of the expiry anxiety of futures. It has only position, leverage, and unrealized P&L visible at any moment. It perfectly aligns with this generation's sense of time — not a three-year hold, not a quarterly review, but right now, tonight, the next two hours.

Derivatives tools designed by traditional finance for risk management are being wielded by a new generation of retail investors as weapons for directional betting. Perp, with its extremely simple design and "fast, thrilling, intense" trading rhythm, perfectly matches this demand.

A Class Barrier Hidden for Two Hundred Years

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

It is breaking down an older wall.

For a long time, the restricted trading hours of traditional stock markets have been a subtle class barrier. Academic research has revealed a startling fact due to the so-called "overnight drift" effect: a disproportionate share of the long-term returns of US stocks occurs outside regular trading hours. Earnings reports and major news are often deliberately released outside of market hours, locking retail investors into a 9-to-5 window. They can only watch helplessly as prices gap at the opening bell — profits that could have been theirs are already carved up by institutions with access to extended trading sessions.

The data coldly confirms this. If you had bought the high-volatility retail darling AMC at the open and sold it at the close every day between 2019 and 2022, your principal would have been nearly wiped out, losing 99.6%; however, if you had only held it overnight during the same period, the return would have been an astonishing 30,000%.

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

On-chain perpetual contract platforms are currently perhaps the only global infrastructure that can truly break this barrier.

This is no longer a theoretical concept. In March of this year, during the panic-stricken weekend of the Iranian attack, global stock exchange doors were firmly shut. Retail investors could only anxiously scroll through social media, while Hyperliquid's crude oil perpetual contract traded $1 billion within 24 hours.

Hyperliquid is highly sought after by a new generation of traders on Instagram

Simultaneously, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and Nasdaq have all announced plans to launch 7×24 round-the-clock trading services. The wall of trading hours that stood for two centuries is being dismantled from both sides at once.

The Endgame of RWA: Everything Can Become a Perp

In the past, perp traders only bet on crypto assets – BTC, ETH, SOL, and a long list of altcoins.

That boundary is disappearing.

Starting from the second half of 2025, despite the overall crypto market entering a downtrend, RWA (Real World Asset) perpetual contracts bucked the trend and rose. Several DEXs have already launched contracts for commodities, stocks, and indices, expanding tradable assets to 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 platform's highest revenue-generating trading pairs. Every weekend, when traditional markets are closed, Hyperliquid's on-chain crude oil perpetual contract becomes the world's only functioning crude oil pricing machine.

The Wall Street Journal has reported on Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ twice

This is a paradigm shift happening right now.

In its latest outlook report, a16z explicitly states that synthetic products (like perpetual contracts) offer deeper liquidity and are a more crypto-native RWA solution than simple tokenization. Essentially, it's a historic choice between 'perpetual contracts vs. tokenization,' and the answer is becoming clear.

Coinbase Institutional Research is even more direct: given the long-term trend of global retail participation in US stocks, stock perpetual contracts are poised 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. Prior to this, the company had completed a $7.6 million seed round led by Paradigm, bringing total cumulative funding to $25.6 million.

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

Hundreds of millions of young people worldwide 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 moving towards Perp.

Regulation Opens Wide, The Chain Never Knew Night

In April 2026, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig announced in a public speech that the regulator would establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for perpetual contracts in the US "in the near term."

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 war.

Global exchanges have already started to race 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 close in design to perpetual contracts; Robinhood announced it is introducing perp for US users; Polymarket and Kalshi have both announced their foray into perpetual contracts. Even prediction markets, after Robinhood launched its product line, traded 11 billion contracts in 2025, boasting over a million active users – its fastest-growing revenue line ever.

Before this, the primary market for perp was offshore platforms outside the US, gathering young people from Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, and São Paulo, using leverage born from fiat currency depreciation anxiety to bet on the world's direction.

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

An on-chain trading platform Hyperliquid, founded in 2022, now challenges the daily volume of the world's top-tier centralized exchanges. A perpetual contract aggregator, 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-tier venture capital firms.

They are all built on the same premise: Generation Z doesn't want to wait for market openings, fill out account opening forms, or pay for the layers of barriers traditional finance erects to "protect" them. What they want is now, leverage, and any asset with a story, in any time zone.

In late 18th-century New York, anyone could be a stockbroker. There were no tickers, no fixed trading venues. Trading usually happened under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, a central meeting point where brokers and merchants bought and sold stocks and government bonds. Trading hours were "whenever everyone was there." It got dark, people dispersed, and trading stopped.

Today, that tree has grown onto the chain, and it never gets dark.