Article by: Prathik Desai

Article compiled by: Block unicorn

Markets are constantly evolving; that's their inherent nature. They eventually transcend the products originally designed. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), founded in 1898 as an exchange primarily trading butter and eggs, later grew into the world's largest derivatives market. Amazon initially sold paperback books by building warehouses and payment systems. Today, those same systems no longer care what they're selling. Books may now be a negligible part of Amazon's revenue.

This model still works today. You initially build infrastructure for one thing, then discover that it can be used for many other things, and then you keep expanding your business to accommodate everything that the infrastructure can support.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are going through this moment.

The infrastructure they built for token trading is also applicable to trading crude oil, silver, stock indices, pre-IPO stocks, or event contracts. In the past seven months, non-cryptocurrency perpetual contracts have accounted for 99% of all trading volume, a permissionless market that didn't exist two years ago.

This market model is ubiquitous. Every exchange is racing to transform into a multi-asset broker, and blockchain technology offers the most economical way to achieve this goal.

cheapest route

Perpetual futures contracts or prediction market contracts don't care whether the underlying asset is Bitcoin or crude oil. All you need is a wallet topped up with stablecoins to buy futures contracts for some memecoin or to bet on Apple's quarterly earnings results. The trading platform itself doesn't care about the underlying asset. Just as the internet and logistics networks don't care what's being traded on Amazon Marketplace.

But why would traders abandon their existing trading venues and switch to trading silver and stocks on an exchange that has only been established for a few years? The reasons are the same as those for people choosing online trading: convenience and cost savings.

Amazon has eliminated intermediaries, allowing sellers in remote locations to ship directly to buyers. This enables sellers to beat competitors by offering subsidized prices. Meanwhile, buyers can easily browse a vast selection of products from home (or anywhere else), add items to their cart, and complete payment.

While the cost advantages offered by blockchain were initially built for cryptocurrency transactions, they are equally applicable to stock settlement, commodity clearing, and cross-border stock trading.

The 24/7 real-time markets on the blockchain also allow global traders to price events at any time. In the past few months, we have witnessed their impact on non-crypto assets on numerous occasions.

Since October 2025, Hyperliquid's permissionless market (HIP-3) has processed approximately $270 billion in transactions across seven developer-deployed trading venues. Of this, 99% of the transactions came from commodities, stocks, forex, stock indices, and pre-IPO contracts. Cryptocurrency trading volume has consistently remained below 1%. Furthermore, the asset portfolio continues to diversify monthly.

During the last weekend of February this year, the conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran escalated, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world's largest commodity exchange, closed. However, Hyperliquid's WTI crude oil perpetual contracts remained open. In just three weekends, the platform's trading volume surged from $25 million to over $550 million. According to a recent report by TD Securities, before the CME reopened on Monday, Hyperliquid had already absorbed approximately 80% of the subsequent volatility in WTI crude oil prices.

Earlier this year, during the surge in precious metal prices, daily trading volume for silver perpetual contracts even approached $1 billion. Even with traditional markets closed, trading continued on blockchain-based trading platforms.

This phenomenon is not unique to criminals; the same phenomenon exists in stock trading.

US stocks account for more than 60% of the global stock market capitalization. For most investors worldwide, purchasing US stocks requires going through intermediaries, converting foreign currency, meeting minimum account balance requirements, and is subject to account type restrictions.

Everyone wants a piece of the pie and a share of the growth story of the world's largest economy. This explains why almost every cryptocurrency exchange wants traders to buy and sell US stocks or derivatives based on US stocks.

On June 1st, Binance announced the launch of zero-commission trading for 7,000 US-listed stocks to its 300 million registered users, offering fractional share trading starting at $5. The vast majority of users are located outside the US and can now invest in US stocks through its stablecoin wallet.

Kraken's xStocks has demonstrated how tokenization can impact investors' access to publicly traded stocks. The platform has tokenized over 100 publicly traded stocks, with a trading volume of $25 billion and 80,000 on-chain holders.

Blockchain can also unlock price discovery mechanisms for traditional markets before IPOs . SpaceX is preparing for the largest IPO in history, expected to raise approximately $75 billion. On June 1st, Anthropic secretly filed its IPO application. OpenAI may follow suit soon. Before these companies went public, price discovery mechanisms were not transparent and were limited to accredited investors.

In my book, *Pricing Private Assets* , I explained how the market prices assets that behave like publicly traded companies.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic possess brand recognition, massive revenue, and hundreds of millions of users. They have everything a publicly traded company has, except for public shareholders. Their marketing strategies ensure that everyone has their own opinion about them. In fact, SpaceX's success rate is unprecedented; almost everyone has their own opinion about it, yet almost no one can truly assess its value.

Blockchain provides a variety of tools that allow the market to price these private companies.

For example, many platforms that were originally cryptocurrency exchanges now offer pre-IPO perpetual contracts, prediction market contracts, and tokenized IPO access for companies that are not yet publicly listed.

Multiple market makers are offering perpetual contracts for companies like SpaceX, Cerebra, and Anthropic on the Hyperliquid platform. Trading volume for these contracts has increased approximately 300-fold over the past six months, surging from $16 million to $4.7 billion. In May, HIP-3 perpetual contracts for these pre-IPO stocks accounted for 7.7% of total trading volume, while this figure is projected to drop to just 0.2% by December 2025.

These trading venues are not only always open and offer lower prices, but they also provide traders with ample liquidity that they can rely on.

During the escalation of the situation in Iran, Hyperliquid's WTI crude oil futures contracts saw daily trading volumes of hundreds of millions of dollars with extremely small price spreads. Between January and April 2026, open interest in WTI crude oil futures contracts surged from $1.8 million to $560 million.

Traditional exchanges can also leverage user deposits to offer cross-margin trading and deep liquidity. Binance, through its integration with PreStocks, allows users to participate in pre-IPO stock trading; while Payward (Kraken's parent company) allows users to invest in tokenized IPOs.

Less than 24 hours ago, Coinbase joined Kraken and Binance in launching malicious contracts targeting pre-IPO stocks, with SpaceX being the first stock targeted.

Building a full-stack financial technology

The convergence of traditional finance and cryptocurrencies is creating a full-stack fintech platform for numerous companies. On one hand, native cryptocurrency platforms are expanding into traditional asset classes; on the other hand, traditional exchanges are rapidly adopting blockchain infrastructure.

In the cryptocurrency space, Kraken has spent over $2.7 billion on acquisitions in the past 12 months, transforming itself into a multi-asset broker. In March 2025, the company acquired injaTrader for $1.5 billion, the largest deal to date to acquire a futures commission broker registered with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Subsequently, the company acquired Backed Finance, thereby gaining independent control over the issuance, trading, and settlement of xStocks. By early 2026, its product offerings had grown from 60 tokenized stocks to 100. Since then, the company has made five more acquisitions in the areas of payments, clearing, and automated trading infrastructure.

Subsequently, the company launched Krak, a payment application that supports more than 300 assets in 160 countries, enabling users to spend, send, and earn rewards using cryptocurrency.

Coinbase has also launched a similar product portfolio.

At its product launch event in December 2025, Coinbase launched commission-free stock trading covering all 50 states in the U.S. and introduced a prediction market through Kalshi.

In August 2025, Coinbase acquired Deribit for $2.9 billion, thereby gaining control of the world's largest cryptocurrency options market. Coinbase is now positioning USDC and its Layer-2 chain, Base, as a settlement platform for a wide range of transactions, from proxy payments to stock trading.

These platforms all entered the financial sector through cryptocurrencies and now possess distribution networks built over decades by traditional financial giants. Binance boasts 300 million registered users, while Kraken serves 15 million clients in 190 countries. This massive user base is their biggest competitive advantage in expanding multi-asset brokerage businesses.

When Binance listed 7,000 US stocks, it didn't need to build demand from scratch. The purchase channels for these stocks and pre-IPO shares were open to users who had already deposited stablecoins multiple times and completed identity verification. For an existing cryptocurrency broker, the marginal cost of adding stock trading was far lower than the cost for a traditional broker to acquire a new customer.

Traditional businesses are also actively adjusting themselves to maintain their competitiveness.

On the same day that Binance launched its US stock trading, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, the world's largest derivatives exchange, announced that all its cryptocurrency futures and options would be available 24/7.

The DTCC, which manages $114 trillion in assets, will pilot tokenized securities in July and launch them fully in October. The pilot program will cover Russell 1000 index constituents, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasury bonds. More than 50 companies, including BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Circle, are participating in the project.

The New York Stock Exchange partnered with Securitize to build a 24/7 trading platform for tokenized stocks. Nasdaq received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March to trade tokenized stocks on its existing trading system.

This is an interesting convergence. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and other traditional financial institutions are pushing for 24/7 operation because cryptocurrencies have proven that markets don't need to close. Cryptocurrency exchanges are also starting to offer traditional assets—oil, silver, indices—because users have shown that any platform that can provide ample liquidity and lower-cost information pricing will attract their demand.

Blockchain is becoming a bridge between the two.

The Evolution of Cryptocurrency as Fintech

Like any technology, online forums hold polarized views on the future of cryptocurrencies. Some believe they will either build a completely new, independent financial system or collapse on their own. In reality, however, the development of cryptocurrencies lies somewhere in between. The same is true of the development of the internet itself.

While opinions on the internet were divided, and some viewed it as the beginning of a new world, it gradually became commodified, eventually becoming ubiquitous, with almost the entire world depending on it. Today, people no longer debate the internet's uses; it has become the common foundation supporting various emerging technologies.

This is precisely the change I believe is happening in the cryptocurrency space. Cryptocurrency technology may not be living up to the initial expectations of the cypherpunks. I doubt most of them even care; at least I don't.

While the internal market is busy discussing Bitcoin cycles and downtrends, a parallel external market is steadily expanding across multiple levels of the financial system. Payment infrastructure, agency commerce, integrated price discovery platforms, and now multi-asset brokerage are all thriving, whether Bitcoin is priced at $60,000 or $100,000.

Charlie Booth of Hepworth Iron Capital provided an insightful explanation of the evolution of endogenous and exogenous markets in a guest commentary published on Token Dispatch last week.

What interests me most is that a technology originally used for trading tokens is now being used to allow retail investors to receive $5 worth of Apple stock on Saturday, settled in stablecoins with fees of less than 1 cent, all built on the infrastructure originally built for memes.

These possibilities only arise when the new infrastructure far surpasses the old infrastructure it replaces. We all know that old habits die hard. The world is discovering blockchain as a panacea for improving financial operations. In some cases, blockchain works by lubricating traditional financial systems; in others, it works by completely replacing outdated systems. Changing for the sake of changing is utterly unwise.

For any human-run industry, resisting change that can improve how existing systems operate is tantamount to suicide. This is because humans are inherently driven to improve inefficient systems. Anything that can enhance system efficiency will be adopted, no matter how novel or radical it may seem. Blockchain technology is in a field with enormous potential for improvement and can effectively reduce such inefficiencies. The adoption of blockchain technology by traditional institutions and markets such as Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange fully demonstrates the increasingly important role blockchain will play in the future of finance.

Every exchange is now a broker (or soon will be). Not all exchanges anticipated this, but that's exactly what they want to be. What's next? When every platform offers stocks, derivatives, prediction markets, and cryptocurrencies on the same app, who will be the ultimate winner? The key lies in how they integrate these assets into their respective platforms and enable users to perform some of the most basic operations in the financial world: spending, transferring, receiving, and earning.

That's all for today. See you in the next article.