Markets are constantly evolving, and that’s their nature. They eventually outgrow the products they were initially designed for. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) started in 1898 as a butter and egg exchange, and grew into the world’s largest derivatives market. Amazon started by selling paperback books, building warehouses and payment systems. Today, the same systems no longer care what they sell. Books might now be a negligible part of Amazon’s revenue.
This pattern continues today. You build infrastructure for one thing, then discover it can be used for many others, and then you expand to accommodate everything the infrastructure can support. Crypto exchanges are going through this moment. The infrastructure they built for token trading also works for crude oil, silver, stock indices, pre-IPO stock, or event contracts. In the last seven months, non-crypto perpetual contracts have accounted for 99% of all trading volume, and this permissionless market didn’t exist two years ago.
Every exchange is racing to become a multi-asset broker, and blockchain technology offers the most economical path to achieve this. Perpetual futures contracts or prediction market contracts don’t care if the underlying asset is Bitcoin or crude oil. You just need a wallet funded with stablecoins to buy futures contracts for some meme coin or bet on the outcome of Apple’s quarterly earnings report. The trading platform itself doesn’t care about the underlying asset, just as the internet and logistics networks don’t care what goods are traded on Amazon’s marketplace.
But why would traders abandon their existing venues to trade silver and stocks on an exchange that’s only a few years old? For the same reasons people choose to trade online: convenience and cost savings. Amazon cut out the middleman, allowing remote sellers to ship directly to buyers, enabling them to beat competitors by offering subsidized prices. While the cost advantages offered by blockchain were initially built for crypto trading, they apply equally to stock settlement, commodity clearing, and cross-border stock trading. The 24/7 real-time markets on the blockchain also allow global traders to price in events at any time.
Since October 2025, Hyperliquid’s permissionless market (HIP-3) has processed approximately $270 billion in trades across seven developer-deployed venues. Of this, 99% of trades came from commodities, stocks, forex, stock indices, and pre-IPO contracts. Crypto trading volume has consistently been less than 1%. Furthermore, the asset portfolio continues to diversify monthly.
On the last weekend of February this year, as tensions escalated between Israel and Iran, the CME, the world’s largest commodity exchange, was closed, but Hyperliquid’s WTI crude oil perpetual contract remained open. In just three weekends, the platform’s trading volume surged from $25 million to over $550 million. According to a recent report by TD Securities, Hyperliquid had already absorbed about 80% of the subsequent volatility in WTI crude oil prices before the CME reopened on Monday.
US stocks represent over 60% of global stock market capitalization. For most investors worldwide, buying US stocks requires going through intermediaries, foreign exchange conversions, minimum account balance requirements, and restricted account types. This explains why almost every crypto exchange wants to enable traders to buy and sell US stocks or derivatives based on US stocks. On June 1st, Binance announced commission-free trading for 7,000 US-listed stocks and fractional share trading starting at $5 for its 300 million registered users.
Blockchain can also unlock pre-IPO price discovery for traditional markets. SpaceX is preparing for the largest IPO in history, expected to raise around $75 billion. On June 1st, Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO application. OpenAI may follow suit. Before these companies go public, price discovery is opaque and limited to accredited investors. Blockchain offers tools to allow markets to price these private companies. In the past six months, trading volume for these contracts has grown approximately 300x, from $16 million to $4.7 billion.
The bidirectional convergence of traditional finance and crypto is creating a full-stack fintech platform for numerous companies. On one hand, crypto-native platforms are expanding into traditional asset classes; on the other hand, traditional exchanges are rapidly adopting blockchain infrastructure. Kraken has spent over $2.7 billion on acquisitions in the past 12 months, transforming into a multi-asset broker. Coinbase has also launched a similar product portfolio, including commission-free stock trading and control of the world’s largest crypto options market through its acquisition of Deribit.
These platforms all entered finance through crypto and now possess distribution networks that traditional financial giants spent decades building. The marginal cost for an existing crypto broker to add stock trading is far lower than the cost for a traditional broker to acquire a new customer. Traditional firms are also adapting to stay competitive, such as the CME Group announcing 24-hour trading for all its crypto futures and options, and DTCC piloting tokenized securities in July.
Blockchain is becoming a bridge between the two. Just as the internet was debated and seen as the dawn of a new world, it became commoditized, ubiquitous, and essential for the functioning of almost the entire world. This is what I believe is happening in crypto. While internal markets are busy discussing Bitcoin cycles and downtrends, an external market is steadily expanding across multiple layers of the financial system.
These possibilities only emerge when new infrastructure is vastly superior to the old infrastructure it replaces. The world is discovering blockchain as a panacea for improving financial operations. In some cases, blockchain works by lubricating traditional financial systems; in others, it works by completely replacing outdated systems. For any industry operated by humans, resisting change that improves how existing systems work is suicidal.
The adoption of blockchain technology by traditional institutions and markets like Nasdaq, NYSE, and CME is a testament to its growing role in the future of finance. Every exchange is now a broker, or will soon become one. When every platform offers stocks, derivatives, prediction markets, and crypto on the same app, the key is how they integrate these assets into their platforms and enable users to perform some of the most fundamental operations in finance: spending, transferring, receiving, and earning money.
[Block unicorn]
The Great Convergence: How Blockchain Infrastructure Is Rewiring Global Finance
The crypto market is undergoing a silent但 transformative revolution—one that transcends the familiar cycles of Bitcoin rallies and stablecoin volatility. The real inflection point isn’t found in on-chain metrics or whale movements, but in a startling structural shift: crypto exchanges are no longer exchanges at all. They are rapidly evolving into full-stack financial platforms, leveraging blockchain’s lower marginal cost, 24/7 settleability, and composability to offer everything—from WTI crude oil perpetuals to SpaceX pre-IPO contracts—while legacy venues remain constrained by legacy architecture.
The data is unequivocal. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 permissionless market, launched in late 2025, has processed ~$270B in volume over seven months—with 99% coming from non-crypto assets: commodities, equities, indices, forex, and private-market contracts. Crypto itself contributes less than 1%. This isn’t a gimmick; it’s infrastructure repurposed. The same oracle stack, margin system, and settlement engine used for BTC/USDC can price Apple EPS outcomes or Iran-Israel geopolitical risk. The underlying asset is irrelevant; only the oracle feed changes.
This isn’t theoretical. During the Israel-Iran escalation in late February, Hyperliquid’s WTI crude oil perpetual traded profitably for three consecutive weekends, absorbing ~80% of the volatility that CME couldn’t—because CME was closed. Volume jumped from $25M to $550M in 72 hours. This is the first instance of a decentralized venue outperforming the world’s largest derivatives exchange during a systemic event. It’s the “night watchman” problem (where blockchain delivers real-time settlement in real-time) made operational.
The momentum is accelerating across the board. Binance’s June 1 stock trading launch—offering 7,000 US equities commission-free, fractional shares at $5—democratizes access for 300M users who previously navigated foreign exchange hurdles, minimum balance requirements, and restricted account types just to participate in US equities. Kraken’s $2.7B acquisition binge and Coinbase’s post-Deribit expansion (now the world’s largest crypto options provider) confirm the same trajectory: crypto-native firms now own distribution, UX, and capital efficiency advantages traditional brokers cannot replicate. The marginal cost for an existing user to begin trading stocks on Binance is zero. The marginal cost for Morgan Stanley to acquire a new crypto user is existential.
Perhaps most consequential is the emergence of permissionless pre-IPO markets. With SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI teeing up historic offerings, private market liquidity has long been an opaque, accredited-only exercise. On-chain instruments now enable global price discovery: volume in these contracts grew 300x—from $16M to $4.7B—in six months. The implications are profound: valuations will no longer be set behind closed doors. Instead, the first major IPO of a private tech company may be preceded by a liquid, decentralized secondary market—ushering in unprecedented transparency and fairness.
Risks Ahead
But opportunity coexists with peril. The regulatory perimeter is blurring dangerously. SEC lawsuits against decentralized protocols and OTC desks offering tokenized stocks suggest coming clashes over how and whether these instruments qualify as securities. Liquidity fragmentation across HIP-3 venues introduces systemic counterparty risk if front-end developers lack institutional-grade risk controls. And while blockchain excels at settlement efficiency, it does not automatically solve counterparty信用 risk—orated data integrity. Bad oracles will always break pricing.
The Bottom Line
This isn’t “crypto going mainstream.” It’s finance being rebuilt on blockchain—one module at a time. The internet didn’t eliminate the post office; it made it obsolete for daily correspondence. Similarly, blockchain won’t coexist with CME or NYSE; it will force them into defensive integration (see: CME’s 24/7 crypto futures, DTCC’s tokenization pilots). The winners will be platforms that offer seamless spend, transfer, earn, and hedge—not just trade—within one interface. The next decade’s fintech unicorn won’t be another Solana or Ethereum. It will be the platform that makes “crypto” an afterthought—because the infrastructure is simply… finance.