Perps - Tokenisation's booming 24/7 price discovery

Perpetual futures linked to real-world assets are becoming an important, always-on source of price discovery, but they remain synthetic, leveraged and imperfect substitutes for primary markets.

• Perps have no expiry date and allow investors to trade price exposure to equities, commodities and currencies when traditional markets are closed.
• The market developed from crypto perps in 2016 to permissionless real-world-asset perps in late 2024, covering selected commodities, foreign exchange markets and equity indices.
• Monthly perp volumes now exceed USD1.12 trillion, while tokenised real-world-asset perp volumes increased 48-fold from about USD15.8 billion in September 2025 to USD774 billion in August 2026.
• These contracts do not provide ownership, delivery or conversion into the underlying asset; they offer only synthetic exposure, and pre-IPO perps have weaker price anchors because no continuously traded public market may exist.
• Outside cash-market hours, stale reference prices, lower depth, difficult arbitrage and leverage can cause overshooting, forced liquidations and misleading signals, while regulation and investor suitability remain unresolved.

Takeaway: RWA perps can serve as an additional price-discovery channel and, where liquidity is sufficient, a provisional hedging tool, but their long-term importance depends on deeper liquidity, stronger links to underlying prices, resilient infrastructure and clearer regulation.