Running on Empty: the spot market thins, while perps gear up for action

Three weeks ago I wrote about BitMEX shutting down. But BitMEX is not closing alone. BitMart and AscendEX have also wound down or announced closures in 2026. 

Since the late-January correction—when Bitcoin fell 15% from $88,000 to $74,500 and triggered some $7B in liquidations—it has been downhill ever since. Aggregate daily spot volume across 44 tracked exchanges sits roughly 70% below January’s levels. In July, Bitcoin’s average daily spot volume was $2.2B, the weakest reading since November 2023. 

CCData’s monthly reports show that combined CEX turnover, spot plus derivatives, fell from $5.95T in January to $3.76T in July, a decline of 37%. A mere six exchanges now handle more than 60% of what remains.

Source: CCData monthly exchange reviews.

Even Coinbase, the largest listed crypto exchange in the world, posted a $359M net loss in Q2 as transaction revenue fell 21% year on year. 

It is no wonder that no one is much interested in trading spot crypto this year. Bitcoin’s volatility has been, in the words of our derivatives trader, flat as a pancake. Deribit’s Bitcoin volatility index, which spent recent years mostly between 50 and 80, now sits in the mid-30s, with upside options priced near record lows. Gold and oil have traveled the opposite direction. Cboe’s gold volatility index hit 46 in January, its highest in years, as gold touched $5,589 per ounce, and its oil equivalent reached roughly 126 after the February strikes on Iran, its highest since the 2020 collapse. The asset famous for volatility has become the quiet one.

In South Korea, for example, capital has rotated from crypto into equities, with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix among the main beneficiaries. SpaceX’s June 12, 2026 market debut took this appetite for equity exposure to another level: its $85.7 billion offering became the largest IPO in history and generated unprecedented trading volume on its first day.

Perps: not just for crypto 

I wrote in July that Hyperliquid saw real-world asset volume exceed crypto volume for the first time. That was not an anomaly. 

HIP-3 markets, which let outside builders deploy their own perp contracts on Hyperliquid, grew from around 2% of the exchange’s volume at the start of 2026 to roughly 40% in late March during the oil-led commodity surge, and 52% by mid-July. So far, the August reading is holding near half.

Sources: CoinDesk, MEXC market report, Yahoo Finance. Approximate values marked. The March-July surge was heavily influenced by commodity volatility.

Skeptics will say the absolute numbers remain small beside legacy infrastructure. Over the most recent full trading day (August 14), Hyperliquid’s WTI perpetual recorded roughly $19M in notional volume. On the same day, CME’s front-month WTI traded approximately 245,000 contracts or $20.3B in notional, as per Yahoo Finance data. On the admittedly imperfect comparison of a rolling 24-hour window against a single settled session, Hyperliquid’s volumes represented a mere 0.1% of CME’s. 

However, what these numbers lack in size they make up for in signal and trajectory. Just as in traditional markets, the most traded real-world asset perpetuals this year have been oil, gold, and tokenized SpaceX. CryptoRank data puts gold, the S&P 500, oil, and SpaceX among the top-traded assets on perp DEXs, with traditional assets now approaching a third of all on-chain perp volume. Oil and precious metals alone accounted for over 67% of HIP-3 volume in the first quarter, and Hyperliquid’s SpaceX perpetual recorded $1.4 billion in volume on IPO day, making it the largest single market in the HIP-3 ecosystem that session. Traders want 24/7, stablecoin-margined commodity exposure with 25 times leverage from a wallet, and six months ago they had nowhere to get it.

When gold is not gold

The single most important thing to know about perpetuals on real-world assets is that the same ticker ≠ same underlying. Instruments sharing a name can track materially different things — different enough that two “gold perps” on different exchanges can be effectively different instruments.

Each venue makes its own reference index. Some are based on crypto-native oracles (a way to feed real-world information to the blockchain), while others price from traditional data feeds. This sometimes becomes a daisy chain where one index uses other venues’ perp prices in their definition, which themselves reference other venues’ indexes in turn. 

There are other differences as well, from handling the nights and weekends when traditional markets close to the schedule for charging funding rates. 

A case study: before April 27, 2026, the “gold perpetual” on OKX (XAU/USDT) was based on an index that was 60% pegged to the price of tokenized Pax Gold (PAXG), which can differ materially from the price of London spot gold. 

After April 27, OKX removed PAXG from the index entirely, rebuilding it around the Pyth oracle at 30%, Hyperliquid’s own gold oracle at another 30%, and traditional data feeds for most of the remainder. Same ticker, materially different underlying, disclosed in a help-center notice four days before it took effect.

For retail, these differences may not be noticeable. But for professional traders, commercial hedgers and institutions, the difference is major. 

The incumbents are unimpressed. CME chief executive Terry Duffy told analysts these products behave like “leverage spot products” and that 94% of CME’s first-half volume came from institutional customers. A University of Houston analysis prepared for ICE found the structure confirms it: no delivery dates means no hedging or calendar spreads, and Hyperliquid’s crude contract covers one barrel against a thousand for CME’s, in a market where commercial firms hedge millions.

All true, and all beside the point. Most of perpetual trading in RWAs is retail demand from outside OECD countries: these venues were built to give global retail access to TradFi instruments that were historically unavailable or prohibitively expensive to non-institutional participants. Even the ICE analysis concedes perpetuals may attract participants who would never have traded futures at all. A one-barrel contract is useless to a refinery and exactly the right size for a first-time trader with a stablecoin wallet.

Put 2026 together and the rotation explains itself. Commodity volatility hit multi-year highs, Bitcoin’s fell to record lows, and crypto prices sagged. Retail went where the movement was: out of spot crypto and into perpetuals on oil, gold, and tokenized equities. For the foreseeable future, the demand moving these markets will be retail, and the flows, the funding rates, and the prices will reflect it.