HTX Research｜Từ chứng khoán Mỹ đến on-chain: Hợp đồng vĩnh viễn tái định hình cục diện giao dịch chứng khoán toàn cầu

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, on-chain perpetual contract mechanisms matured – the GLP pool model of GMX, the order book architecture of dYdX v4, and Hyperliquid's dedicated L1 engine built on Arbitrum Stylus reduced on-chain derivatives latency to milliseconds, while offering round-the-clock trading capabilities impossible on traditional centralized exchanges through built-in oracles and liquidation engines. Second, oracle infrastructure underwent a leapfrog upgrade – Chainlink Data Streams and Pyth Network enabled Asian stock prices to be uploaded on-chain with sub-second latency, resolving the long-standing issue of price source reliability for tokenized financial products. Third, the regulatory framework initially took shape – the SEC signaled a positive stance between late 2025 and 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 track.

From a product structure perspective, the current market comprises two distinct but 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 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 needing 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 only use stablecoins as margin to track asset price targets. Their greatest advantages are 24/7 trading, up to 20x leverage, and ultra-fast listing capability without the need for custodial underlying assets. A typical example is that 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, with Binance quickly following suit by listing similar targets.

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

By 2026, the competitive landscape for tokenized stock perpetuals presents a clear three-layer 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, commands approximately 50% of the trading volume share in the perpetual contract market. Its core strategy can be summarized as 'geographic arbitrage' – prioritizing coverage of high-liquidity Asian markets like South Korea and Japan, building liquidity moats during local exchange off-hours, thereby attracting speculators and hedgers from global time zones. Binance, as the world's largest crypto trading platform, accelerated the expansion of its tokenized stock perpetual product line 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 natural arbitrage opportunities.

Coinbase, on the other hand, relies on its CFTC regulatory license to pursue a 'compliant alternative' path, providing the first regulated on-chain stock derivatives gateway for US institutional investors. The four index perpetual contracts (AI10, China10, Defense10, Tech100) it launched in June 2026 adopt a centralized clearing model, with each transaction undergoing KYC verification and anti-money laundering checks, starkly contrasting with Hyperliquid's decentralized, permissionless model. dYdX v4 builds an independent application chain based on the Cosmos SDK, focusing on institutional-grade order books and cross-chain interoperability; GMX's GLP model offers more flexible listing and liquidity provisioning mechanisms for smaller assets. Observing 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 subsequent day's stock opening prices ranges from 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 independent mechanisms for information aggregation and price discovery 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 that they create three unique values unavailable in traditional stock markets. The first value is overnight price discovery. Systematic research on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix perpetuals reveals that after-hours price movements systematically lead the next day's opening price. Specifically, if the Samsung Electronics perpetual contract shows an upward trend after the KOSPI market closes, the probability of a higher opening the next day is approximately 82%; conversely, a downward trend predicts a lower opening with a probability of up to 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 perpetual contracts can not only predict the direction of the next day's open but also quite accurately anticipate the magnitude of the opening gap. This information aggregation capability stems from the 24/7 nature of on-chain markets – global macroeconomic news, company announcements, and industry developments are reflected in perpetual contract 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 design of perpetual contracts naturally transfers value between longs and shorts – when market sentiment is bullish, longs pay funding to shorts, and vice versa. Data shows that the Samsung Electronics perpetual contract generates an average intraday premium of approximately 0.15%, while SK Hynix generates about 0.23%. Theoretically, constructing a Delta-neutral strategy – buying fully collateralized spot tokens while selling an equivalent amount of perpetual contract exposure – can completely eliminate directional risk and achieve an annualized return solely from funding rates of 66.7% to 119.7%. Of course, factors like slippage costs, basis risk, and capital utilization compress theoretical returns in practice, but this is already attractive enough to lure professional market makers and quantitative hedge funds into large-scale deployment. 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 remains at 0.93%, reaching a maximum of 2.3% during extreme periods. Especially during nighttime and weekends, when on-chain liquidity decreases due to spot market closures, the spread widens further, providing a natural 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 perpetual contract market is breeding four innovative directions with independent commercial value. The first direction is specialized market maker services. Unlike the traditional financial market's monopoly by特许做市商, making markets for on-chain perpetuals is open to any participant with sufficient capital and technical capability. The current fragmented nature of the same underlying asset being priced independently across multiple platforms means that spreads naturally widen to 0.15% - 0.75% during nighttime and weekends, creating sustained and highly predictable profit opportunities for specialized market makers. The second direction is regionalized oracle services. The pricing needs of Asian market stocks outside New York and London trading hours are creating a new oracle sub-market – oracle service providers capable of delivering high-frequency, multi-layer verified pricing data during Asian market off-hours will become key infrastructure providers in this track. The third direction is tokenized issuance intermediary services. Currently, a large number of stocks from the KOSPI 200, Nikkei 225, and Hang Seng Index have not yet been tokenized. A one-stop 'Issuance-as-a-Service' platform providing compliant connectivity, asset custody, pricing parameter setting, and liquidity guidance between traditional security issuers and on-chain trading platforms holds vast market potential. The fourth direction is basis-based on-chain hedge funds. Compared to traditional basis trading, the on-chain perpetual version offers unique advantages like fast capital turnover (no securities settlement cycle) and composite yield sources from cross-platform spreads, allowing professional hedge funds to dynamically allocate positions across multiple platforms for high-frequency turnover to amplify returns.

From a broader industry perspective, Coinbase's listing of CFTC-regulated index perpetuals marks the beginning of formal classification of this new financial product by US regulators. The Basel Committee restarted its review of bank crypto asset exposure rules in November 2025. If banks are permitted to hold tokenized stock exposure, the liquidity of 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 one-ten-thousandth of a percent.

5. Risk Framework and Investment Strategies

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 – perpetual contract protocols suffered cumulative losses exceeding $500 million between 2024 and 2025 due to oracle attacks, liquidation logic flaws, and front-end manipulation. 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. At the market risk level, high leverage exponentially amplifies liquidation risk alongside potential gains – low liquidity environments during earnings seasons or major policy events can trigger cascading liquidations, leading to price crashes. Liquidity fragmentation constitutes the third dimension of systemic threat – perpetual contracts for the same underlying asset, like Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix, are scattered across multiple independent platforms with their own pricing and lack a unified clearing coordination mechanism. Under extreme market conditions, this could lead to large and persistent price distortions between parallel markets.

Regulatory uncertainty is the largest external variable. National stances diverge significantly on this issue: the US CLARITY Act, while proposing safe harbor provisions for DeFi developers, faces overall legislative hurdles; 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 yet to issue specific regulatory guidance for tokenized stocks; and Japan's Financial Services Agency's cautious stance on crypto derivatives may also limit the product's pace of adoption in Japan.

Based on the risk framework above, investment strategies can be constructed across three dimensions. The first dimension is 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 exposure to the leading RWA protocol and decentralized derivatives 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 utilize overnight price discovery to optimize their traditional stock trading decisions for the next day. Empirical data suggests this can enhance the win rate of Asian market short-term strategies by approximately 7 to 12 percentage points. The third dimension is Gamma market making strategy – simultaneously providing liquidity on multiple exchanges while automatically hedging exposure to earn bid-ask spreads, also capturing periodic directional funding rate income to boost total returns. Key risk monitoring 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 liability boundaries, whether the CLARITY Act achieves substantive legislative progress in Congress, and the specific compliance requirements for the Travel Rule in DeFi scenarios in the next revision of FATF standards.

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 inception of blockchain technology: can on-chain finance transcend the narrow scope of 'crypto's on-chain finance' to truly become 'on-chain finance for all assets'? The 85% price correlation and regression coefficients of 0.93 to 1.00 for the Samsung Electronics perpetual contract powerfully demonstrate 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. Judging from an investment clock perspective, the period from the second half of 2026 to 2027 is a critical catalytic window for this track. The market reception of 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 indicators will be the core benchmarks for determining 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 return potential coexisting with high uncertainty. Participation should adhere to the yardsticks of controllable underlying risk, traceable compliance pathways, and verifiable technological iteration when screening investment targets.