The US$500 billion experiment to build 24/7 markets on blockchain

When the United States and Israel launched their aerial assault on Iran on the last Saturday of February, the world’s main oil markets were closed. The price of crude kept moving anyway.

On Trade.xyz, a little-known market built on top of crypto exchange Hyperliquid, speculators bought and sold a blockchain-based oil derivative through the weekend. By the time conventional futures reopened, traders had already spent hours putting a price on the conflict’s impact.

Modern finance spent decades building markets around a common architecture: recognized venues, set trading hours and benchmark prices that anchored everyone else. Crypto has broken from that convention. Its markets run continuously, cross borders easily and are increasingly filling the gaps that traditional exchanges leave blank.

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Trade.xyz is one of the clearest tests of how far that break can go. Run by a team of about a dozen, the startup has spent less than a year creating perpetual futures tied to crude oil, precious metals, stock indexes and companies about to go public, including SpaceX. Since launching in October, those markets have already generated some US$500 billion in trading volume and account for more than 99 per cent of activity across Hyperliquid’s third-party market system, known as HIP-3.

That success has emboldened Trade.xyz and Hyperliquid to chase a more ambitious goal. They’re lobbying regulators to open the door to pre-IPO perps in the U.S., where they say the instruments could help modernize the traditional process for initial public offerings by improving price discovery. Hyperliquid operates outside the United States and isn’t officially open to American trader s. Trade.xyz is subject to the same restrictions.

Hyperliquid — and by extension, Trade.xyz — appear to have already won over one crucial ally. U.S. President Donald Trump, an industry advocate whose family has wide-ranging interests in crypto, said regulators are working to bring Hyperliquid into the country.