Bloomberg is floating a fresh assessment of blockchain's place in traditional finance, and the catalyst is perpetual futures — “perps” — the crypto-native trading product now spreading into markets for stocks, metals, and oil. The shift marks a notable turn after years in which blockchain-based finance projects struggled to win over established market participants.

The product that crypto built

A traditional futures contract is a bet on a future price with a fixed end date. A perpetual future removes that end date, allowing traders to hold a leveraged position for as long as they like. Because the contracts never expire, exchanges typically rely on periodic funding payments to keep perp prices aligned with the underlying spot market. Those payments are exchanged between traders on opposite sides of a position, with the direction — who pays whom — set by where the perp trades relative to spot.

BitMEX popularized the product in 2016. Perps have since become the dominant form of crypto derivatives trading, accounting for the majority of the sector's volume. Open interest across crypto perps currently sits at approximately $67–81 billion. Open interest — the total value of positions still open — measures how much money is actually riding on these contracts.

Outside crypto, open interest in perpetual futures has reached around $9 billion. Bloomberg's reporting ties the perp boom to a $62 trillion market spanning stocks, metals, and oil.

Hyperliquid and Ripple move in

Much of the momentum traces back to Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange built around perpetual futures, where trades settle on a blockchain rather than through a traditional clearing intermediary.

Hyperliquid reported total open interest of more than $18 billion in late September 2026, up from approximately $13 billion at the end of August. Around October 5–6, 2026, the Bloomberg Terminal — the data workstation used across banks, asset managers, and trading desks — began streaming Hyperliquid perpetual futures prices around the clock, covering asset classes that include crypto and commodities. The integration places a crypto-native market structure on the same screens professionals use for conventional futures, rather than behind a separate crypto venue.

Ripple's prime brokerage unit — the service layer through which institutions access trading and financing — has also moved into perpetual swaps linked to real-world assets, aimed at institutional clients. Bloomberg reported in October 2026 that the unit is expected to tap into the roughly $9 billion segment for institutional perp trading.

From halted pilots to regulatory support

The early era of blockchain in finance was marked by skepticism, with the halted Australian Securities Exchange blockchain project standing as a cautionary tale — a multi-year effort to rebuild its clearing system that the exchange abandoned in late 2022. Incumbents attempted to bolt distributed ledgers onto existing systems, and the results often failed to justify the effort.

A Bloomberg Businessweek article published on September 24, 2026, detailed US regulatory support for blockchain innovation under the Trump administration, with a focus on bringing Hyperliquid into US markets. Regulatory posture is a central variable for any product seeking a foothold in this space: derivatives markets operate under close oversight, and the rules determine where and how institutions can participate.

What this means for traders and intermediaries

For traders, the headline features are 24/7 access and high leverage. Stock and commodity markets have historically kept business hours, while perps never close. A trader can react to weekend news on oil or a stock before the opening bell — though leverage also means losses can arrive faster and larger than in a plain cash trade.

Bloomberg's coverage frames these products as carrying both tremendous opportunity and serious risk. Risk management practices built around market closes and expiry dates may need rethinking when neither exists.

For the crypto ecosystem, perps represent a case where a native product is being exported rather than imported. Tokenization efforts often pitched bringing traditional assets onto blockchains, while perps are bringing blockchain trading habits to traditional assets. The near-term markers to follow are already visible in the record: open-interest totals inside and outside crypto, the build-out of institutional perp services by players like Ripple, and how US regulators proceed on bringing Hyperliquid into domestic markets.