HTX Research｜From Stocks to On-Chain: Perpetual Contracts Reshape Global Stock 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 – models like GMX's GLP pool, dYdX v4's order book architecture, and Hyperliquid's specialized L1 engine built on Arbitrum Stylus have reduced on-chain derivative latency to milliseconds, while offering 24/7 uninterrupted trading capabilities unavailable on traditional centralized exchanges through built-in oracles and liquidation engines. Second, the leapfrog upgrade in oracle infrastructure – Chainlink Data Streams and the Pyth Network enable Asian stock prices to be uploaded on-chain with sub-second latency, solving the long-standing problem of price source reliability limiting tokenized financial products. Third, the initial clarity in regulatory frameworks – the SEC signaled positive momentum from late 2025 to early 2026, preparing to launch an "Innovation Exemption" to provide a regulatory sandbox path for compliant tokenized products; Coinbase officially listed 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 yet complementary product categories. The first is fully collateralized spot tokenization, represented by Ondo Finance, xStocks, and Backed. Ondo Finance holds an absolute leading position with a TVL of $887.8 million, commanding a 60.87% market share, 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 needing to open a local brokerage account, and on-chain settlement shortens T+2 to T+0. 

The second category is perpetual contracts, represented by Hyperliquid, Binance, and dYdX. These products do not hold actual stocks but use stablecoins as margin to track the price of underlying assets. Their biggest advantages are 24/7 trading, leverage up to 20x, and ultra-fast listing capabilities without the need for custody of the underlying asset. A typical example is after the Hyperliquid community passed the HIP-3 proposal in October 2025, it successively listed perpetual contracts for Korean blue-chip stocks like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, triggering a wave of "tokenized stock contract listings" centered on the Asian market, which was quickly followed by Binance listing similar products.

2. Market Structure Restructuring and Competitive Landscape Driven by Perpetual Contracts

The competitive landscape for tokenized stock perpetual contracts in 2026 exhibits a clear three-tier structure: the dominant layer of on-chain protocols, the catching-up layer of centralized exchanges, and the gradually entering layer of institutions. Hyperliquid, leveraging the ultra-low latency and zero gas fees of its dedicated L1 chain, captures approximately 50% of the trading volume in the perpetual contract market. Its core strategy can be summarized as "geographic arbitrage" – prioritizing high-liquidity Asian markets like South Korea and Japan, establishing liquidity moats during local exchange off-hours to attract speculators and hedgers from global time zones. Binance, as the world's largest crypto exchange, accelerated the expansion of its tokenized stock perpetual contract product line in late 2025, forming a duopoly with Hyperliquid. Price differences between the two platforms for the same underlying asset average between 0.93% and 1.03%, reaching up to 2.3% during extreme market conditions. This reflects insufficient market maker competition and creates a natural breeding ground for arbitrage.

Coinbase, on the other hand, pursues a "compliant alternative" path by leveraging its CFTC regulatory license, offering US institutional investors the first regulated on-chain stock derivative entry point. Its four index perpetual contracts (AI10, China10, Defense10, Tech100) listed in June 2026 use a centralized clearing model, with every transaction undergoing KYC verification and anti-money laundering checks – a stark contrast to Hyperliquid's decentralized, permissionless model. dYdX v4, built on the Cosmos SDK as an independent application chain, focuses on institutional-grade order books and cross-chain interoperability; GMX's GLP model offers greater flexibility for listing smaller assets and providing liquidity. Looking at the evolution of competition focal points, 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 the correlation coefficient between perpetual contract prices and the next day's opening price of 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 perpetual contracts are no longer merely passive price tracking tools 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 Perpetual Contracts

The fundamental reason tokenized stock perpetual contracts have garnered such widespread attention is their ability to create three unique values that traditional stock markets cannot provide. The first value is overnight price discovery. Systematic research on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix perpetual contracts reveals that the after-hours movements of both underlying assets systematically lead the next day's opening price. Specifically, if the Samsung Electronics perpetual contract shows an upward trend after the KOSPI close, the probability of a higher opening the next day is approximately 82%; conversely, a downward trend indicates an 96% probability of a lower opening. SK Hynix data is equally striking, with an upward trend predicting a 95% probability of a higher opening and a downward trend predicting a 78% probability of a lower opening. More critically, the regression coefficient analysis shows values of 0.93 and 1.00 respectively, indicating that overnight perpetual contracts can not only predict the direction of the next day's opening but also fairly accurately predict the magnitude of the opening gap. This information aggregation ability stems from the 24/7 nature of on-chain markets – global macro news, company announcements, and industry dynamics are reflected in perpetual contract prices in real-time without waiting for the next trading day's opening auction.

The second value is the Delta-neutral arbitrage mechanism driven by funding rates. The funding rate design in perpetual contracts naturally transfers profits between long and short positions – when market sentiment is bullish, longs pay funding to shorts, and vice versa. Data shows the Samsung Electronics perpetual contract generates an average intraday premium of approximately 0.15%, while SK Hynix's is around 0.23%. Theoretically, constructing a Delta-neutral strategy – buying fully collateralized spot tokens while simultaneously shorting an equivalent amount of perpetual contracts – can completely eliminate directional exposure and achieve annualized returns of 66.7% to 119.7% solely from funding rates. While factors like slippage costs, basis risk, and capital utilization in real-world execution will compress theoretical returns, this is already sufficient to attract large-scale entry by professional market makers and quantitative hedge funds. The third value is the structural opportunity for cross-exchange arbitrage. Due to the same underlying assets being scattered across multiple independently operated platforms without a unified clearing mechanism, the average price spread for the Samsung Electronics perpetual contract between Binance and Hyperliquid is maintained at 0.93%, reaching a maximum of 2.3% during extreme periods. Particularly during nighttime and weekends when on-chain liquidity decreases due to spot market closures, spreads widen further, creating a natural periodic profit window for arbitrageurs with multi-platform access.

4. Four Directions of Innovation Trends and Commercial Opportunities

The rapid expansion of the tokenized stock perpetual contract market is spawning four innovation directions with independent commercial value. The first direction is specialized market making services. Unlike the monopoly model of franchise market makers in traditional financial markets, on-chain perpetual contract market making is open to any participant with sufficient capital and technical capability. The current status of identical underlying assets being priced independently across multiple platforms means spreads naturally widen to 0.15% to 0.75% during nighttime and weekend periods, creating a continuous and highly predictable profit space for professional market makers. The second direction is regionalized oracle services. The pricing demand for Asian market stocks outside New York and London trading hours has created a new oracle sub-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 in this track. The third direction is tokenized issuance intermediary services. Currently, a large number of 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 connection, asset custody, pricing parameter setting, and liquidity guidance between traditional security issuers and on-chain trading platforms has a vast market space. The fourth direction is basis-based on-chain hedge funds. Compared to traditional basis hedging, the on-chain perpetual contract version has unique advantages including fast capital turnover (no security settlement cycle) and cross-platform spreads providing compound return sources. 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 perpetual contracts marks the beginning of US regulators formally classifying this new type of financial product. The Basel Committee restarted its review of bank crypto exposure rules in November 2025. Once banks are allowed to hold tokenized stock exposure, liquidity in the entire track will experience exponential growth. 4Pillars Research predicts that if 1% of global stock market capitalization is tokenized, the market size could reach $1.34 trillion by 2030, while current penetration is less than 0.01%.

5. Risk Framework and Investment Strategy

Although the tokenized stock perpetual contract market is growing rapidly, its risk structure is complex and multi-layered. Smart contract risk is the most direct technical threat – between 2024 and 2025, cumulative losses from oracle attacks, liquidation logic vulnerabilities, and front-end manipulation in perpetual contract protocols exceeded $500 million. The most cautionary event was the JELLY token incident on Hyperliquid in February 2025, which exposed defects in the liquidation mechanism, causing some users to suffer actual losses involuntarily. At the market risk level, the high leverage characteristic amplifies liquidation risk exponentially while magnifying returns – low liquidity environments during earnings season or major policy events can trigger cascading liquidations, leading to price crashes. Liquidity fragmentation risk constitutes the third dimension of systemic threat – perpetual contracts for the same underlying asset like Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix are spread across multiple independent platforms with their own pricing. The lack of a unified clearing coordination mechanism between platforms could lead to massive and persistent price spread distortions between parallel markets during extreme market conditions.

Regulatory uncertainty is the largest external variable. National attitudes on this issue show significant divergence: although the US CLARITY Act proposes a safe harbor clause for DeFi developers, overall legislative progress is stalled; the EU's MiCA framework's specific coverage of on-chain stock derivatives is not yet clear; Hong Kong and Singapore, as Asian financial centers, have not issued specific regulatory guidelines for tokenized stocks; and the Japanese Financial Services Agency's cautious approach to crypto derivatives may also limit the product's promotion speed in the Japanese market.

Based on the above risk framework, investment strategies can be constructed from three dimensions. The first dimension is platform token allocation strategy – the HYPE token is highly correlated with Hyperliquid platform trading volume due to its 30% fee buyback and burn mechanism, while ONDO and DYDX represent core beta assets for the leading RWA protocol and decentralized derivative infrastructure, respectively. The second dimension is ecosystem participation strategy – quantitative teams can deploy automated trading systems based on funding rate arbitrage and cross-platform spread arbitrage; retail investors can use overnight price discovery function to optimize next-day traditional stock trading decisions, with empirical data showing this can boost short-term strategy win rates in Asian markets by approximately 7 to 12 percentage points. The third dimension is Gamma market making strategy – simultaneously providing liquidity on multiple exchanges and automatically hedging exposure to earn bid-ask spreads, while utilizing periodic directional returns from funding rates to enhance overall returns. Key risk observation indicators should focus on three time nodes: the impact of the Roman Storm trial verdict in the second half of 2026 on the legal definition of DeFi developer responsibility boundaries; whether the CLARITY Act can achieve substantial legislative progress in Congress; and the specific compliance requirements for the Travel Rule in DeFi scenarios in the next FATF standard revision.

6. Conclusion and Future Outlook

The true historical significance of tokenized stock perpetual contracts lies in their attempt to answer the most core question since the birth of blockchain technology: can on-chain finance transcend the narrow scope of "on-chain finance for cryptocurrencies" and truly become "on-chain finance for all assets"? The 85% price movement consistency and regression coefficients of 0.93 to 1.00 for the Samsung Electronics perpetual contract strongly prove that on-chain derivatives can not only effectively track the price movement trajectory of traditional assets but also independently perform effective price discovery and information aggregation functions during traditional market off-hours. From an investment clock perspective, the period from the second half of 2026 to 2027 is the key catalytic window for this track – the market response after Coinbase's regulated index perpetual contract listing, whether the SEC's "Innovation Exemption" can be formally implemented, and whether Hyperliquid can maintain its market share leadership in the on-chain perpetual contract space – these three observation indicators will serve as the core reference system for judging whether the tokenized stock market can transition from the experimental phase to the mainstream phase. For investors with sufficient risk tolerance, the huge gap between the current penetration rate of less than 0.01% of global stock market capitalization and the compound growth rate exceeding 200% constitutes a classic early-stage track investment landscape – high return potential coexists with high uncertainty. Participation should be guided by screening investment targets based on controllable underlying risks, traceable compliance paths, and verifiable technological iterations.