Crypto Perpetual Futures Will Kill Traditional Stock Exchanges

Arthur Hayes predicts equity perps on crypto exchanges will overtake CME-style futures and hollow out legacy stock markets.

Outspoken BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has said that crypto-style perpetual futures will “kill” traditional stock exchanges, arguing that equity price discovery will move to 24/7 perp markets on crypto platforms.

His forecast is coming on the back of U.S. and Asian exchanges like CBOE and SGX getting ready to roll out their own perpetual products by the end of 2025. Hayes frames this as an “adapt or die” moment for traditional finance (TradFi), claiming that if established exchanges don’t copy crypto’s perp model and socialized loss margin systems, they’ll lose liquidity and relevance to more nimble crypto venues and DEXs.

Perps Go Mainstream as Crypto and TradFi Converge

In his latest essay, the crypto trader revisited how BitMEX’s invention of the perpetual swap, a futures-like product with no expiry, reshaped crypto trading by concentrating liquidity into a single “delta one” contract that tracks spot prices closely while allowing high leverage.

He made the case that perps, combined with socialized loss systems and insurance funds, solved two things retail traders want most: access to big leverage and deep liquidity, without the legal risk of owing more than their initial margin if a trade goes wrong.

That design, according to Hayes, is now leaking into equities. He highlighted Hyperliquid’s HIP-3, a permissionless protocol that allowed a firm called XYZ to launch a Nasdaq 100 equity perp that already trades over $100 million in daily volume.

In his view, equity perps will become “the hottest product of 2026,” with both centralized exchanges and decentralized platforms racing to list them by the end of next year.

The former BitMEX CEO also pointed to changes in the U.S. regulatory landscape. After years of hostility following the FTX collapse and his own legal battles with the CFTC, he says the mood shifted again in 2025 under President Trump, whose administration has taken a more crypto-friendly stance.

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That, he believes, has opened the door to sandbox-style experiments for new derivatives and encouraged global regulators to follow Washington’s lead, giving exchanges like SGX confidence to pursue perp listings.

Why Hayes Thinks Perps Will Overtake the CME

Hayes’ central claim is that, by late this decade, the largest derivatives on key U.S. benchmarks like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 will be perps traded on crypto exchanges, not futures listed on CME and other incumbents.

He said that traditional clearinghouses are constrained by under-capitalized guarantee funds, strict rules around retail leverage, and legacy operating hours that cannot keep up with a 24/7 information cycle.

In his telling, perpetual swaps have flipped that model by letting traders post less collateral while still accessing meaningful exposure, thus reducing the need to park large sums with an exchange, which is becoming a sensitive issue in an industry that has endured multiple hacks and failures.

Hayes himself remains an active and sometimes controversial trader. Recent on-chain data showed him offloading sizable positions in ETH, ENA, ETHFI, LDO, AAVE, and UNI after a steep market drop, even though he had previously hinted he would not take profits on his ETH stack.

The clear outlier in his recent positioning is privacy coin ZEC, which he praised on X after it outperformed the broader altcoin market with triple-digit monthly gains.