In a rental house in Gangnam, Seoul, a 27-year-old programmer stares at his computer screen late at night.

He is not playing a game. What flickers on the screen is the position page of Hyperliquid, a long position on an ETH perpetual contract, with 20x leverage, using his three months' savings as margin. He has done the math: at Seoul's current housing prices, based on his salary level, saving every penny would take him about thirty years to buy a modest apartment. But in thirty years, he would be fifty-seven.

He is not an exception; he represents a generation.

By early 2025, over 16.2 million South Koreans held crypto accounts, accounting for about 32% of the total population, surpassing the number of stock account holders. In the weeks following Trump's re-election, over 500,000 South Koreans opened new crypto trading accounts. An observation about this group was described as follows: Seoul's young people are acting with concentrated bets and high leverage, with tens of thousands of accounts moving roughly in sync, generating a market impact that no single institutional investor can match.

You could call it a gambling culture, but it is also rational desperation.

The same story unfolds in a different language on the other side of the globe.

In Lagos, the purchasing power of the Naira is evaporating at a visible rate. In March 2025, following a sudden currency devaluation, the on-chain transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa surged to nearly $25 billion in a single month against the backdrop of a general decline in on-chain transactions in other global regions. About a third of Nigeria's adults hold or use cryptocurrency, making it the most crypto-adopting country globally. For many Nigerians, this is not speculation. In a country where even having a bank account is challenging, this is the only trusted store of value.

In Mumbai, India, retail participation in the derivatives market skyrocketed from 2% in 2018 to 41% in 2025. The number of trading accounts surged from 36 million to 154 million in five years. SEBI's study of nearly ten million individual stock derivatives traders revealed that over 40% are under 30 years old, and over three-quarters earn less than the equivalent of $5,000 annually. They engage in high-leverage trading with extremely limited incomes as a buffer, and regardless of regulatory warnings, they cannot stop.

Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai are microcosms of the world. Contemporary young people are all converging on the same tool: perpetual contracts.

This is not a story of the crypto industry; it is a collective action of young people worldwide using leverage tools to resist the implosion of their era, driven by structural inequality.

A Genius Idea, Thirty Years in the Making

The Perpetual Contract, commonly known as Perp in the industry, was not an invention of the crypto industry.

In 1993, Nobel laureate in economics Robert Shiller officially proposed this idea. In his design, it was envisioned as an ultimate cash-settled instrument without an expiration date, capable of tracking the long-term value of illiquid assets, originally designed to hedge real estate price risk.

However, this design was ahead of its time, as the machinery of traditional finance was too ponderous. Wall Street had built an extremely vast system around fixed expiry dates, batch settlements, and centralized clearing. The old machine, driven by paper documents and layers of intermediaries, inherently resisted the flexibility of "never-ending delivery." Shiller's idea slept in academic journals for over two decades, with no one having the capability or motivation to bring it to life.

It wasn't until 2016 that Arthur Hayes of BitMEX introduced the perpetual contract to cryptocurrency.

During those two years, BitMEX rapidly rose from the fringes to an industry leader, propelled by perpetual contracts.

The secret was not in Bitcoin itself, but in the perpetual contract unleashing one of the oldest human impulses: leveraged directional betting. No expiry date, no Greek letters, no rollovers, no exercising. Only one decision remained: up or down, by how much.

a16z investment partner Jay Drain, in a recent report that sparked widespread discussion, defined the essence of this matter in one sentence: "Perpetual contracts strip away all the complexity of options, eliminating the need to choose a strike price, manage expiry dates, or worry about time decay eroding a correct directional bet. It retains only one thing: a pure bet on price movement. The explosive growth of 0DTE options has proven the scale of this demand."

When he mentioned 0DTE, he was referring to another booming product in the US stock market—zero-day-to-expiration options. By 2025, the average daily trading volume of 0DTE SPX reached 2.3 million contracts, a 51% year-on-year increase, accounting for 59% of all S&P 500 options trading volume. Retail investors represent 50% to 60% of this trading volume.

No need to wait, no need for complexity, just now, give me leverage.

Perp simply took this demand to the extreme.

Numbers are the most honest testament to this evolution. In 2025, the total trading volume of centralized exchange perpetual contracts reached $86.2 trillion, a 47% year-on-year increase; on-chain DEX perpetual contracts saw even more astounding growth, with an annual trading volume of $6.7 trillion, a 346% year-on-year increase. Perpetual contracts now represent over 70% of all centralized crypto exchange volume and around 78% of all crypto derivative trading volume.

The nominal trading volume of Bitcoin perpetual futures contracts exceeds the Bitcoin spot trading volume by about six times.

This market structure of "derivative-led pricing" has never been seen in any traditional asset class such as gold, crude oil, or even the S&P 500.

Dopamine, Tribes, and PNL: Trading Becomes a Way of Life

The crazy spring of 2021 was the starting point to understand all of this.

Robinhood, with its colorful interface and zero-commission slogan, simplified the complex financial game into a sliding game on a mobile phone. This product design collided with a historic vacuum of global home isolation: tens of millions of young people holding government relief funds, losing traditional gambling venues such as sports events, casinos, and bars, with the stock market becoming the world's largest and only 24/7 arena.

The retail traders of Reddit forum WallStreetBets discovered that the hedge fund Melvin Capital was heavily shorting GME, so they rallied through social media, used call options to skyrocket the stock price, and forced a top Wall Street hedge fund to seek a bailout.

The GME event announced to the world one thing: retail traders realized that through derivative leverage, they could directly rewrite pricing logic.

But GME was just a trigger point; something deeper had already taken shape.

Modern trading apps are increasingly game-like in design: real-time changing numbers, flashing red and green colors, and transaction sound prompts. This is fundamentally a high-frequency feedback dopamine system. In the past, trading required turning on a computer and reading research reports; now, while on the subway, on the toilet, or queuing for coffee, a quick swipe on the phone completes a trade. When the barrier to entry for trading is low enough, it becomes a fragmented pastime like watching short videos or playing mobile games.

PNL (Profit and Loss) has become a new calling card. A screenshot of profitable trades is proof of "strength," while self-deprecating over losses is "authentic" social currency. On Discord channels or X, real-time financial fluctuations are more impactful than any static life photo. People who buy the same meme coin naturally form a community of shared interests, and the emotional connection of "getting rich together" or "going to zero together" is much more solid than a mere hobby.

And thus, trading has become a daily social and lifestyle for a new generation of young people.

Among all trading tools, perpetual futures contracts are the perfect dopamine vehicle.

It lacks the complexity of options, the expiration anxiety of futures. It has only positions, only leverage, only unrealized PnL visible at all times. It aligns perfectly with this generation's sense of time, not three years of holding, not a quarterly review, but the moment, tonight, the next two hours.

Traditional financial derivative instruments designed for risk management are now being used by a new generation of retail investors as weapons for directional speculation. With its extremely simple design, Perp, with its "fast, crisp, fierce" trading pace, perfectly meets this need.

An Age-Old Class Barrier Revealed

However, the significance of perpetual contracts goes far beyond "lower entry barrier gambling."

It is breaking down a much older wall.

For a long time, the restricted trading hours of the traditional stock market have been a hidden class barrier. Academic research has revealed a startling fact: a disproportionate amount of the long-term returns of the US stock market is generated outside regular trading hours due to the so-called "overnight drift" effect. Earnings reports and major news are deliberately timed to avoid the opening hours, locking retail investors into the nine-to-five window, only to helplessly watch prices gap up at the open — the profit that was supposed to be theirs has long been divided up by institutions with extended hour privileges.

Data coldly confirms this. If you bought the high-volatility retail darling AMC at the open every day and sold at the close between 2019 and 2022, your capital would almost be wiped out, with losses of up to 99.6%; but if you only held overnight, your returns during the same period would be as high as 30,000%.

This is not a story about luck. This is about the structural imbalance of information rights, time rights, and pricing rights — an imbalance that has existed for two hundred years.

A blockchain-based perpetual contract platform may currently be the only global infrastructure capable of truly breaking through this barrier.

This is no longer a theoretical concept. In March of this year, during the weekend of panic sparked by the Iran attack, with major exchanges worldwide closed, retail investors could only anxiously scroll through social media, while Hyperliquid's crude oil perpetual contract saw $1 billion in trading volume within 24 hours.

Hyperliquid is gaining popularity among the new generation of traders on Instagram

Meanwhile, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and Nasdaq have successively announced the launch of 24/7 round-the-clock trading services. The wall that has stood for two centuries in the trading hours is now being dismantled from both sides.

The Endgame of RWAs: Everything Can Be a Perp

Previously, perp traders were only betting on crypto assets—BTC, ETH, SOL, and a long list of altcoins.

This boundary is disappearing.

Starting from the second half of 2025, despite the overall crypto market entering a bear cycle, RWA (Real World Asset) perpetual contracts are defying the trend. Several DEXs have launched commodity, stock, and stock index contracts, expanding the tradable assets to NVIDIA, Samsung, SpaceX, as well as commodities such as silver, palladium, and others.

Recently, RWA assets briefly accounted for 44% of Hyperliquid's total trading volume, consistently ranking as the platform's highest-earning trading pairs. Every weekend when traditional markets are closed, Hyperliquid's on-chain crude oil perpetual contract becomes the world's only operational crude oil pricing mechanism.

The Wall Street Journal reported twice on Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ

This is an ongoing paradigm shift.

a16z clearly stated in its latest outlook report: Synthetic products (such as perpetual contracts) provide deeper liquidity and are a more crypto-native solution for RWA than simple tokenization. Essentially, this is a historical choice between "Perpetual Contracts vs. Tokenization," and the answer is becoming evident.

Coinbase Institutional Research is more direct: as the long-term trend of global retail participation in US stocks continues, stock perpetual contracts are expected to become the preferred tool for a new generation of retail traders, offering 24/7 access and capital efficiency.

The capital has already sensed this direction.

On April 28, 2026, the crypto derivatives platform Liquid announced the completion of an $18 million Series A funding round, led by Neo and Left Lane Capital, with participation from Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, and other institutions. Previously, the company had completed a $7.6 million seed round led by Paradigm, bringing the total funding to $25.6 million.

Liquid was founded by former Two Sigma quant researcher and Harvard graduate Franklyn Wang. He is 25 years old this year. The company was initially just a perpetual contract aggregator, integrating decentralized derivative exchanges such as Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Ostium into a single interface. Today, it has expanded to stocks, forex, commodities, and prediction markets, supporting over 500 trading pairs. Polymarket positions can also be traded on it, with leverage of up to 200x.

Millions of young people around the world are waiting for a simple enough tool that allows them to bet on the direction of the world with minimal friction.

And the top talents from traditional finance are all moving towards Perp.

Regulation Opens Up, On-chain Never Goes Dark

In April 2026, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig announced in a public speech that the regulatory agency would establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for perpetual contracts "soon" on U.S. soil.

His exact words were: "The previous administration failed to create a pathway for these markets to exist onshore. Under my leadership, the CFTC will use all available tools to bring perpetual contracts and other new derivative products onshore, enabling them to thrive in centralized and decentralized markets alike."

It was almost a public declaration of war.

Global exchanges have already started to move. Kraken's parent company acquired Bitnomial, which holds a perpetual contract license, for up to $550 million; Coinbase launched long-term futures products that closely resemble perpetual contracts; Robinhood announced it is introducing perps for U.S. users; Polymarket and Kalshi have also declared their foray into the perpetual contract space. Even the prediction market Robinhood, after going live, traded over 11 billion contracts throughout 2025 with over a million active users—a revenue line that has seen the fastest growth in the platform's history.

Prior to this, the primary market for perps was offshore platforms outside the U.S., where young people from Seoul, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, and Sao Paulo leveraged their fiat devaluation anxiety to bet on the world's direction.

The opening of the U.S. market means that the world's deepest liquidity pool will meet the most participated financial tool of this era on the same stage.

Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange platform founded in 2022, now boasts a daily trading volume that can rival top-tier centralized exchanges globally. Liquid, a perpetual contract aggregator launched in August 2025, processed $30 billion in trading volume within eight months and has just completed a Series A funding round led by a top-tier venture capital firm.

They are all built on the same thing: Gen Z does not want to wait for the market to open, does not want to fill out account opening forms, and does not want to bear the cost of the layers of barriers set up by traditional finance to "protect" them. What they want is now, is leverage, is any asset with a story in any time zone.

In late 18th century New York, anyone could become a stockbroker, with no ticker tape and no fixed trading venue. Trading usually took place under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, serving as a focal point where brokers and merchants bought and sold stocks and government bonds. Trading hours were simply "whenever everyone was there." When night fell, they dispersed, and trading ceased.

Today, this tree has grown on the blockchain, and it will never be night.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia