Beyond ETFs: How Derivatives & Tokenization Are Reshaping Crypto

Wei Liao

June 30, 2026

Perpetuals, Options, and the Shift from Access to Infrastructure

Executive Summary:

Crypto has entered a new phase following the introduction of spot ETFs. What was once a retail-driven asset class is now increasingly institutional, with ETFs creating a durable bridge between traditional portfolios and digital assets. Institutional demand for ETF exposure has translated into higher activity on regulated derivatives platforms. This activity has strengthened the role of regulated venues, deepened cross-market liquidity, and forged durable structural links between crypto and traditional portfolio infrastructure.
Derivatives have displaced spot as the primary locus of crypto price discovery and risk transfer. In 2025, annual notional derivatives volume reached roughly $111.5T across crypto-native centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, and TradFi venues, versus spot turnover of about $25.3T. That implies a derivatives-to-spot ratio of approximately 4.4x, compared with 3.5x in 2023 and less than 1x before 2020. In this report, we take a deep dive into the growth of both the crypto perpetuals market as well as the crypto options market.
Volume understates TradFi’s role. Crypto-native venues still dominate high-velocity trading flow, especially in perpetuals. But TradFi’s share of open interest is disproportionately higher than its share of volume, suggesting that regulated venues play a larger role in longer-duration institutional risk warehousing than turnover alone would imply.
Perp funding needs a new ETF-era interpretation. Negative funding is no longer automatically bearish. It can still signal stress, but it can also reflect ETF-linked hedging, basis trades, venue segmentation, or structural short-perp supply from arbitrage desks. Funding now should be read alongside ETF flows, dated futures basis, open interest, and venue positioning.
The next convergence phase is infrastructure, not just access. ETFs helped bring crypto exposure into traditional portfolios; stablecoins and tokenization point to a deeper shift as selected cash, collateral, settlement, issuance, and servicing workflows move onto blockchain-based rails. In short: the first transition was about access; the second is about infrastructure. For more, see full report here.