Perpetual Futures in Decentralised Finance: Mechanics, Economic Claims, and the Drivers of Trading VolumeDisclosure: not investment advice
A multi-asset study of DeFi perpetual futures across crypto, tokenized equities and tokenized commodities, using endogenous event detection to identify 1,797 volume anomalies and a systematic 24/7 trading premium.
International Journal of Financial Studies 14(7): 178 doi:10.3390/ijfs14070178
Contents
Perpetual futures in DeFi reached roughly $41B in daily notional by early 2026, across three quite different underlyings: native crypto, tokenized US equities, and tokenized commodities. Those three inherit very different reference markets, and comparing them is the point.
The dataset
17 assets — 5 crypto, 8 tokenized US equities, 4 tokenized commodities — across three DeFi platforms, collected over 7.5 months from public REST APIs and cross-referenced against conventional market data.
Endogenous event detection
Classical event studies begin with a calendar: you know the announcement date and measure around it. A market that never closes has no bell and no agreed calendar, so the method has to invert. We detect abnormal volume first, using rolling three-day t-tests, and only then ask what each anomaly coincided with.
That surfaced 1,797 statistically significant volume anomalies, which we map back to identifiable catalysts.
The 24/7 premium
The clearest structural finding is a systematic weekend and holiday effect: volume craters on Saturdays and spikes on days when traditional markets are closed. There is also a maturity gradient in how faithfully each contract tracks its underlying — crypto perpetuals track closely, equity perpetuals less so, and commodity perpetuals worst of all.
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