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- Global Investment Research
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Perps - Tokenisation's booming 24/7 price discovery
Perpetual futures, or perps, allow price discovery to continue when traditional markets are closed. Their use is growing rapidly, but they come with important limitations.
Traditional markets may close, but the news that moves them does not stop. Earnings announcements, geopolitical shocks and policy remarks can all arrive after the bell. Investors can reassess what an asset is worth, but they may not be able to trade it until the market reopens.
Perpetual futures, or perps, let investors gain exposure to changes in an asset's price without owning the asset itself. Unlike conventional futures, they have no expiry date. Increasingly, perps offer round-the-clock exposure to real-world assets such as equities, commodities and currencies. When new information arrives, the perp can absorb orders and produce a market-clearing price. It can provide both an early indication of where the underlying asset may reopen and, with limits, a way to transfer some risk before it does.
Perps first focused on crypto assets in 2016. Permissionless perps linked to real-world assets followed in late 2024, initially covering selected commodities, foreign exchange markets and equity indices. Today, a range of providers and marketplaces offer similar products
There are even perps linked to pre-IPO companies. But these contracts have a weaker price anchor because there may be no continuously traded public market against which to compare them.
Trading has expanded rapidly. Monthly perp volumes now exceed USD1.12 trillion. Tokenised real-world assets (RWA) perp volumes rose 48-fold in less than a year, from about USD15.8 billion in September 2025 to USD774 billion in August 2026.
It’s important to understand perps’ characteristics and limitations, however. An RWA perp does not give the investor the underlying asset. There is no delivery or conversion into the real instrument. Instead, it provides synthetic exposure to its price.
Nor is a perp a substitute for the primary market. Outside cash market hours, the external reference price is stale, arbitrage is harder, depth is lower and leverage can make the contract’s own flows disproportionately important. The same mechanism that allows price discovery can therefore produce overshooting, forced liquidations or a misleading signal. Perps also carry risks. Leverage can magnify losses, while forced liquidations can distort prices. Questions also remain around regulation and whether these products are suitable for all investors.
For now, RWA perps are best seen as an additional source of price discovery and, where liquidity allows, a provisional hedging tool. Their future will depend on deeper liquidity, stronger links to underlying prices, resilient market infrastructure and clearer regulation. But their rapid growth suggests perps could become an important part of the tokenised asset universe.
Nonetheless, the rapid growth in trading volumes suggests this product will be a very important element of the tokenised asset universe.
Would you like to know more? In the full report, we take a deep dive into what perps are, how they work, and how they have evolved from being focused primarily on cryptocurrencies to a growing fixation on real-world assets. Subscribers to HSBC Global Investment Research can access the report by clicking here.*
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