Where pros actually trade perps, futures and options.

A perpetual swap, or perp, is a futures contract with no expiry. You can hold it as long as your margin survives. It tracks spot through a funding mechanism BitMEX invented in 2016, and it is now the dominant crypto derivative.

Funding is a small payment swapped between longs and shorts, usually every 8 hours. If the perp trades above spot, longs pay shorts to push the price back down; below spot, shorts pay longs. It is the glue that keeps a perp pinned to the underlying.

Leverage means you post only a fraction of the position as margin. When losses eat through that margin buffer, the engine force-closes your position to stop you going negative. Higher leverage shrinks the buffer, so a small move can trigger it.

When a liquidation cannot be filled at a good price, the insurance fund absorbs the shortfall so winning traders still get paid in full. A well-funded insurance fund is what keeps a venue from socializing losses onto profitable accounts.

If the insurance fund cannot cover a cascade, auto-deleveraging kicks in. The engine closes some profitable opposing positions to balance the book. It is a last resort, and getting ADL’d out of a winning trade is a real risk in violent moves.

On a CEX the engine runs on private servers. On a perp DEX like Hyperliquid, the order book, funding, and liquidations settle on-chain, so anyone can verify them. The trade-off is governance: a decentralized venue can still intervene in a crisis.

DEX share of perp open interest climbed from ~2% in early 2024 to ~10-13% by early 2026, and CEX share of OI fell from 96.4% to ~86.5%. Hyperliquid leads, but newcomers like Aster, Pacifica, and Extended are each grabbing a few points. It’s fragmentation, not one winner.

Perpetuals are now roughly 78% of all crypto derivatives volume. Combined perp volume rose about 75% in two years, from $4.14T to $7.24T monthly. Dated futures keep shrinking in relative terms as traders default to perps.

Options OI keeps climbing. Deribit still owns 90%+ of ETH options, but in April 2026 BlackRock’s IBIT options OI ($27.61B) passed Deribit’s BTC options OI ($26.9B), the first time a regulated US venue led offshore on BTC. The offshore monopoly is cracking.

Tokenized-equity and index perpetuals jumped from ~0.03% to ~1.72% of derivatives volume in a single quarter, led by Binance TradFi Perps and Kraken’s xStocks Perp. It’s a new product line and a fresh regulatory question, not a passing fad.

Persistent funding spreads, between CEXs and perp DEXs and between perps and spot, now anchor large delta-neutral carry books. Transparent on-chain funding makes cross-venue arb easier to run at scale, so more capital sits in these strategies.

MiCA locks derivatives out of the EU without a license, and the US extracted big settlements from OKX and earlier BitMEX. But post-settlement, OKX re-entered the US and Coinbase and Kraken are building compliant derivatives. Hong Kong licensed a batch of platforms. The pattern is clear.

MEXC’s 0% pairs, Binance promos, and perp-DEX pressure are pushing taker fees down across the board. At the top end, fees no longer separate venues. Liquidity and product range do, which is why depth and options access carry more weight in our scoring.