Coinbase is expanding its derivatives offering once again. The exchange announced on November 11, 2026, that it will open perpetual futures markets for four tokens—GRAM, GRASS, QNT, and ZRO—with trading scheduled to begin at or after 12:00 PM UTC on November 13, 2026. The two-day gap between the announcement and the launch leaves traders a short runway to prepare. The 'at or after' phrasing, common in exchange launch notices, leaves room for the precise go-live to shift within the day.

The lineup spans distinct corners of the crypto landscape: a messaging-app blockchain, a bandwidth-sharing network, an enterprise interoperability project, and a cross-chain messaging protocol.

What Coinbase Is Launching

Perpetual futures, commonly known as perps, are derivative contracts that track an asset's price without ever expiring. They allow traders to take positions on prices rising or falling without holding the underlying token, and they typically involve leverage, which amplifies both gains and losses. In practice, perp platforms rely on a funding-rate mechanism—periodic payments exchanged between long and short position holders—to keep contract prices tethered to the underlying token's spot price.

The new markets will be open to retail and institutional participants alike. Access runs through Coinbase and Coinbase Advanced, the exchange's more feature-heavy trading interface. In selected jurisdictions, liquidity will also be drawn from Deribit. Derivatives rules vary by region, which is why the Deribit liquidity pool applies only in certain jurisdictions.

Deribit is running a parallel rollout of its own. The derivatives platform, which Coinbase acquired in 2025, will list USDC-settled perpetual contracts for the same four tokens and will add a fifth—PEARL—that does not appear on the Coinbase list. Under USDC settlement, profits and losses are paid out in the dollar-pegged stablecoin rather than in the token being traded.

Four Tokens, Four Different Profiles

GRAM is the native token of The Open Network. It traded as Toncoin (TON) until a rebrand in June 2026, and the network has been integrated with Telegram, one of the world's largest messaging platforms.

GRASS powers a Solana-based DePIN network—a category of projects that use token incentives to reward real-world infrastructure contributions such as bandwidth or storage. The resource it mobilizes is unused internet bandwidth, which the network uses for AI-driven data collection. The token has a fixed supply of 1 billion.

QNT is the token behind Quant Network's Overledger, a system built to help enterprise blockchains communicate with one another—a persistent challenge as businesses adopt different distributed ledgers. QNT is used for Overledger licensing and Fusion Rollup fees, and its fixed supply sits at approximately 14.6 million tokens.

ZRO is the governance token for LayerZero, a cross-chain messaging framework. LayerZero lets separate blockchains pass messages and instructions between one another—infrastructure that underpins cross-chain transfers and communication—and ZRO holders have a say in how the protocol is governed.

Demand Is Already There

These markets are not being built on empty ground. Open interest for ZRO and QNT on other platforms already runs into the tens of millions of dollars, meaning derivatives traders are already active in at least two of these assets—the launch brings that activity within reach of Coinbase's customer base.

The launch also lines up with a broader push from Coinbase Prime, the company's institutional arm, to widen institutional access to crypto markets. Once the new markets go live, their volume and open interest will offer a read on how much of the existing derivatives demand follows onto Coinbase and Deribit.

Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen.