Perpetual futures, explained
bitsaboutmoney.com
bitsaboutmoney.com
The few actual decentralized exchanges are too slow and expensive.
That's one of the sticking points I have with the /idea/ of the technology
> confirmation times are very long, like any other on-chain transaction
Yes. synchronisation is where everything breaks down because you have to get everyone to agree to the new state.
edit: Sorry, not everyone, but a consensus, and that consensus is then what everyone agrees is the state.
Key part:
> fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books
> Importantly, HyperCore does not rely on the crutch of off-chain order books. A core design principle is full decentralization with one consistent order of transactions achieved through HyperBFT consensus.
https://github.com/hyperliquid-dex/node
"For lowest latency, run the node in Tokyo, Japan."
Decentralization means to run all of the closed-source nodes in the same AWS datacenter!
all you can do is run their visor, and they push out whatever proprietary blob they produce and restart "your" nodes at their command.
E.g. GMX on Arbitrum chain is no longer prohibitively expensive.
Left some comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46172450
It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time. It was supposed to be decentralized, but in practice a few big exchanges control all the transactions and a few big mining pools control all the minting. It was supposed to be "code is law", and yet if you find a big exploit on smart contracts it'll be unwound later on and the cops will still show up for you. And as you say, it was supposed to be trustless, but counterparty risk is everywhere.
And it turns out nobody cares, because to a first approximation nobody is in crypto for the libertarian principles. It is all about number go up; always has been, always will be. It's not even worth pointing out anymore.
I agree 100% - Meme stocks go brrrrrrrr
The idea that it's a currency that lives beyond the reach of governments is laughable (as soon as something goes bang a lot of the owners call for... regulators and government oversight)
Even the vast majority of free-market maximalists will support a government bailout of large banks or the auto industry if it will save their investment portfolio.
Mostly, meme coins go into a screaming dive after the initial pump. Go type some meme coin names into Coinmarketcap.
Except for Bitcoin and Ethereum, almost everything in crypto has crashed hard.
It's incredibly difficult to see either instrument as a currency, or a share, or an asset other than the fact that other people will (at this point) buy it back off you for more than you paid for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
> The adoption was criticized both internationally and within El Salvador, due to the volatility of Bitcoin, its environmental impact, and lack of transparency regarding the government's fiscal policy. In 2024, El Salvador agreed to partially limit its involvement with Bitcoin as part of a deal made with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In March 2025, The Economist wrote that El Salvador's bitcoin experiment had been a failure, bringing more costs than benefits to the El Salvador economy.[4]
> In 2025, Bitcoin was rescinded as legal tender in El Salvador.[5] Besides the aforementioned problems and hacking incidents, research showed it was rarely used by the public.[5]
The Central African Republic has had similar (well worse really) experience
This is a joke right? Tether (USDT) is pegged to the dollar... and there is not really a limit to the USD printing machine, nobody ever claimed a stablecoin would have a limited supply. It's literally the main critique of the fiat system levied by crypto proponents.
The only asset which has made and still hold promises of not increasing its supply over its limit set through its consensus code is Bitcoin. And it is nowhere close to ever change... as a matter of fact if it changed, most people wouldn't call that fork Bitcoin.
But the claim about USDT ever claiming that its supply wouldn't increase is pure fantasy. It literally makes no sense if you understand how the peg is maintained (technically by minting and burning tokens).
and not only will other people worldwide use it immediately, they will also pay for all your infrastructure costs as they update the chain state with every transaction fee that they pay
the permissionless nature means you can deploy anything as cenralized or decentralized as you want, and its up to consumers to be discerning and its only their fault if they are not
cost wise this will always be attractive to developers and for them to bring over every audience they can muster, because web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
Can I leverage trade derivatives and also earn fees from liquidity pooling with Robux?
Web 2.0 based on boring old primitives like ad dollars and banks actually funds things that in real life provide ultimately virtually all the actual utility obtained by the world from software.
You said
> web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
It appears to me that that is just incorrect on its face because web 2.0 cloud actually DOES compete insofar as its literally everywhere as we speak and web 3.0 is a buzzword from 2014 that has yet to achieve actual meaning.
To rephrase do you feel it is accurate to say that something that represents basically all the real value obtained by network computers doesn't competes with something that provides? What again?
Ask an AI about it to catch up, this is a decade too late to have that conversation
the only thing that matters is that there is liquidity and permissionless deployment, we are far far beyond “should there be liquidity”, you can build business on smart contract platforms solely because there is liquidity and people with frictions you can solve just like any other industry or the financial services sector in general
Largely the folks that want trustless currency use chains like BTC, BCH, XMR, or ZEC.
Some more modern decentralised exchanges (DEXes) dealing with leveraged trades and try to minimise centralisation also include YieldBases:
https://yieldbasis.com/markets
There are other exchanges that are much more centralised, like Hyperliquid, and it is incorrect to call these decentralised. But there are truly decentralised alternatives as well.
GMX is not as popular, let's say Binance, because onchain user experience has been very hard. You don't want to sign every order from your crypto wallet. Transaction cost ("gas fee") used to be too high for trading. This is finally changing with the latest Ethereum improvement proposals, dealing with so called account abstraction.
[1] Because futures always settle on an external price, the price feed must come from some oracle. In the case of GMX, there are keepers (multiple of them) who are responsible to bring the correct price to Arbitrum chain and trigger the settlement. But it's not a single party.
There is a common confusion in this (perhaps?). Most businesses get created primarily to make money. Not primarily to solve the world's problems. It's easy to say "if they really had their customers at heart...". Well, yeah, but that's not and has never been the priority. It's not a cynical view, it's being realistic.
All kinds of mayhem follows. All the way to fundamental research papers such as "on average actively managed mutual funds do not beat XX index". Well, yeah, mutual funds don't get created because someone is good at it. They get created because someone wants to make money. Beating XX is not the first objective, or competence, of the entrepreneurs. Hopefully that fund doesn't last too long but often it does, and anyway there are many of them.
So anyway, there are plenty of ways to try and leverage ideas of cryptography, crytocurrencies, block chain - most of which are still accessible - and most of the ventures in the field are not going to be primarily about solving the users' problems.
A few things I think I've learned:
In its current state, most retail investors are simply supplying to the sophisticated investor.
Although some DeFi projects make a genuine effort to provide analysis tools to level the playing field, it's not nearly enough.
The safest least volatile yields in DeFi are lending your stable coins into a system such as aave. The yield is not far from a high yield USD savings account.
Exchanges such as Uniswap may be the most important legit tool in DeFi. The biggest problem is the liquidity provider's ability to protect their downside...so the investor adds on more sophisticated monitoring/hedging schemes. This gets us back to the retail investor being at a severe disadvantage.
It's even more brutal in the more established, traditional markets though. Obviously if you're going long and managing a portfolio that's a different perspective, but it's very hard as an outsider to compete with the smart funds in the world. You might be smart but most of those funds are very smart, well capitalized, and have a very deep understanding of market structure.
Another reason is that the future may be trading slightly below the spot price of BTC due to lots of traders shorting.
The point of perps is:
- Easy access to leverage. Unlike options or futures, there's no need to roll over.
- It's the easiest way to short a coin. Most of the time you even get paid the funding rate to be short.
- Trading fees are typically much lower than for spot.
- Volume and liquidity can be better for perps than for spot. The BTC/USDT perp did 10x the volume of the spot pair in the last 24h on Binance.
Other than that, futures tend to be more liquid and capital efficient.
Patrick is largely correct on perp futures being mostly used as a leverage instrument to gamble on bitcoin or ether by retail. However I think he's missing one point which is that actually some institutional players also use CME futures to gain exposure to Bitcoin (e.g., BITO ETF or a pension fund that wants to gain exposure to crypto and have a fiduciary duty to hold assets with AAA custodians).
The thesis being that if you're an institution, you don't trust the relatively "fly-by" offshore crypto or even US-regulated custodians of crypto. When you trade CME bitcoin futures, your settlement is guaranteed by the clearing entities of Chicago Mercantile Exchange which are bulge bracket firms of TradFi. So why CME futures largely reflect a premium over the spot BTC price - and this premium is a function of the demand of bitcoin at anytime and the Fed fund rate. As the bitcoin futures market is highly efficient, the CME futures premium is arbitraged across the various DeFi and CeFi exchanges with basis points added relative to the default risk of each venue.
And the basis trade itself is not a "risk-free" arbitrage. The seller on the other side of gamblers are exposed to "right-tail" risk - your premium you get paid to "carry" the bitcoin is fixed while the collateral you must hold in theory to "hold" the coin on behalf of the buyer could be in theory infinite if bitcoin skyrockets to infinity. Sell too much and you might not have enough collateral before the futures settlement happens (for a fixed term futures, not perps) kind of like a reverse but still deadly scenario with Silicon Valley Bank (i.e., you incur "paper loss" that goes away if you can hold it to expiry; but you get force liquidated before then).
The CME clearinghouse itself is the guarantor. And below it are the clearing firms. The trading firms don't guarantee trades, the clearing firms do.
In fact, for many products, the CME is the counterparty for both sides of a trade.
The real risk is to be auto-deleveraged when the other side blows up and no one is here to buy its long. Then the perp exchange closes your short and you have a naked long.
that's deep, in all senses.
If you want to get into the deepest detail there are several decentralised perpetual futures exchanges.
Here are some open source codebases on Github:
https://github.com/vegaprotocol/vega
https://github.com/dydxprotocol/v4-chain/
https://github.com/gmx-io/gmx-synthetics
https://github.com/0xOstium/smart-contracts-public/
Vega is a stalled project, but they have good documentation:
you can go through the drift labs code to see implementation of perps
The understandable hatred of the casino and many scams has blinded most of HN as to the true potential of the technology and its associated new public institutions.
That's what a decentralized public blockchain is, a new kind of public institution.
One small example of this is that the most state-of-the-art perpetual futures market in the world is an Ethereum Layer 2 named Lighter https://app.lighter.xyz/markets/
They are so important that now every country in the world has and is making laws about them.
2. Tokenizing all assets (equities, commodities, real estate, etc.)
3. Being able to use those stablecoins/tokenized assets in DeFi protocols that are more automated, more impartial, and less extractive than corresponding traditional finance systems. Including lending and marketplaces to buy/sell. Many industries will see parts of their back offices go onchain. Tokenized real estate + onchain swapping = onchain real estate markets. Stablecoins + onchain swapping = onchain forex markets.
4. All of these being inherently global, so anyone in the world with a mobile phone can access these assets and the onchain financial system.
5. All of these being size-agnostic. The same assets and technologies work with a 5 cent buy of tokenized TSLA stock just as they do with a 50 million buy.
6. All of these capabilities enjoy instant settlement. The act of trading the tokenized asset also settles the trade. There is no more T+1 settlement risk or delay. This reduces risk and improves capital efficiency.
7. Decentralized public chains, especially Ethereum, offer new kinds of credible commitments that are strong enough to bind corporations and governments because the agreements are automated by the highly decentralized chain. Centralized chains (almost all chains) can't do this because they are too easy to rewrite history if governments apply pressure. When using Ethereum, instead of relying on a counterparty to keep their word and then suing them if they don't, parts of that agreement can become automated by the chain, reducing risk of breach of contract and cost of compliance. Maximum decentralization greatly reduces overall risk, which is very valuable at global scale.
8. Generally increased permissionless innovation, stronger property rights, and freer markets. Anybody can use onchain or build onchain, there's no gatekeepers.
How does that work?
The blockchain can only enforce its desired state on the blockchain itself. It cannot affect the real world unless you delegate said effects to a trusted party... which defeats the whole point of a decentralized, trust-less blockchain, and you could let that trusted party just run a centralized database.
How do you reconcile the ability to lose a private key with real-world assets? In the "fiat" system we rely on courts to be the ultimate arbiters in such cases and it works well enough. In this system, what should happen if someone owning a tokenized real estate asset loses the corresponding private key?
> The act of trading the tokenized asset also settles the trade
This again only works on the blockchain. When the tokens represent real-world assets the two are not in sync, and there's a risk they may not be reconcilable (you "buy" some real-estate on the blockchain, but the government having jurisdiction over the real-world location contests your ownership claim and people in uniform with guns prevent you from entering into said real estate).
A centralized token (like USDC) being held in a trustless wallet is much much better and more useful than the traditional financial system.
For example, USDC in my wallet can be lent out in any onchain lending venue I pick and be sent to anybody in the world instantly.
> lose a private key with real-world assets
You're right, private key security is super important. The practical solution here is that there will be many different kinds of wallets with different trust assumptions and recovery models, and people/corporations will be directed to use the one that's net best for them. Many will be fully or semi custodial.
> When the tokens represent real-world assets the two are not in sync, and there's a risk they may not be reconcilable
Right. The idea here is to have very stringent evaluations of tokenization frameworks, to figure out which real-world asset tokens are actually quality bearer assets (from both a legal and technical standpoint) and which are not. An early example of the work here is BlueChip's stablecoin ratings https://bluechip.org/en
You inherit all of the inefficiency of cryptocurrency and none of the decentralization. This is why the idea was abandoned back with colored coins in like 2013. With etherium, you inherit even more centralization due to the nature of the scripting system and PoS.
Centralized assets in an on-chain wallet are much more useful than in the traditional financial system, for many reasons, but it comes down to friction reduction.
Is this not just a state of the art innovation in the Ponzi scheme and online casino space?
It's also true that perp platforms can provide very accessible and efficient hedging. For example, if you own NVDA and don't want exposure to their quarterly results volatility, you can take a much smaller amount of collateral than your underlying NVDA shares and use that to open a 10x leveraged short on NVDA in the same size as your main NVDA position. This makes you "delta neutral" so the USD value of your position won't change even if NVDA craters on quarterly results. All without selling your underlying shares. Then you can close the short after the quarterly results are absorbed by the market.
Separately, here is a list of transformative benefits of public decentralized chains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175312
Dark markets are still active and people move large amounts across international borders effortlessly.
As an example of being effectively anonymous, I can easily take some cash, meet up at a cafe nearby with someone from a p2p site to swap it to crypto, and then pay a foreign company for hosting services for years with that crypto, sharing zero personal information.