The Perpification of Wall Street

Look, I’m not running deep TA or bollinger bands or whatever to determine the next high or low to determine my next trade. I trade based on narratives, some fundamentals, and occasionally culture. I’m a venture investor and spend a lot of time seeking out trends before they emerge, and right now, I can’t stop thinking about the "perpification" of Wall Street products.

When I think of crypto product-market fit, the first thing that comes to me is the perpetual future, or "perp." Originally proposed by economist Robert Shiller in 1992 for illiquid assets, the concept never gained traction in traditional markets for various reasons.

However, as crypto trading expanded it needed a way to solve liquidity and settlement constraints without the hassle of constantly rolling expiring contracts. Perps delivered. They allow traders to take leveraged long or short positions with no expiry date. It is a product defined by pure price action: if you go 50x long and the asset sells off, you hit a liquidation price and get wiped out. If it goes up, you win with 50x your initial position value.

Same Same

While crypto adopted perps as one of its flagship products, the hottest derivative for retail traders in the wider financial world isn't a perpetual future (yet)—it’s the Zero-Days-To-Expiry (0DTE) option.

These contracts allow you to bet on whether an index or stock will finish above or below a strike price today. According to CBOE, the 0DTE market has grown five-fold in three years with retail traders account for roughly 50–60 % of this volume.

Whether it’s 0DTEs in TradFi or 100x perps in crypto, retail traders are effectively buying the same product: cheap, intraday volatility. A lottery ticket.

You put up a small premium to control a massive amount of notional value. It’s a binary outcome: be right and print multiples on your capital, or be wrong and the ticket expires worthless. While institutions use these for hedging, for retail, this is a bet on market structure—a high-volatility strategy to get more juice on a directional bet.

Perps as the Occam’s Razor of trading

With 0DTE options booming and perps dominating in the crypto world, it’s hard not to imagine what happens when the two converge.

I’ve dabbled with early equity perp protocols mirroring the price of TSLA or CRCL. Historically, the missing link was reliable oracles; without incredibly fast price feeds, these products lacked integrity. Today, providers like Pyth and Chainlink are streaming exchange prices on-chain with sub-second latency solving this issue.

With that infrastructure in place, the door is open for equity, ETF, commodity, and more perps. But why would a retail trader choose an on-chain equity perp over a 0DTE option? A few reasons stand out to me:

• A Simpler Mental Model: A perp is linear. Profit or loss equals price movement multiplied by position size. There are no "Greeks" (Delta, Gamma, Theta) to worry about, and no time decay eating your premium. If you think a stock will go up, you choose your level of leverage, long the perp, and hope it doesn’t go down below your liquidation price. The simplicity is addictive and fuels dopamine like you're at the craps table.

• Global, Permissionless Access: 0DTE options are restricted by geography, local financial regulations, and often by a brokerage's own internal compliance or account minimums. A trader in another country may find it difficult or impossible to access the SPX 0DTE market. On-chain perps are inherently permissionless and censorship-resistant. If you have an internet connection and the right crypto collateral, you can trade these.

• Flexibility in Time: A 0DTE option creates a binary event at the closing bell. But what if the move happens after hours or overnight? Perps trade 24/7 and settle continuously. You aren't forced to exit at 4:00 PM, and you aren't stuck holding through the close if you want to exit early. While some protocols will close your equity perp at closing bell, theres no reason these couldn’t extend into after hours or use Robinhoods 24 hour feed.

The Coming Perpification of Wall Street

It seems very unlikely that perps will kill 0DTEs. These products are ingrained in Wall Street, and there is a level of familiarity with them. Options remain a powerful tool for hedging and expressing convex views. However, the question isn't whether perps replace options—it's whether the 0DTE retail crowd >> seeking cheap, leveraged, directional bets, will opt for the simpler, always-on mechanism. Perps offer a distinct lever: one that is always available, always liquid, and refreshingly simple. They are the Occam’s Razor of this highly leveraged directional bet.

Innovation will likely start at the edges—crypto-native exchanges and synthetic protocols experimenting with small caps and index perps. But as we’ve learned from the crypto markets, when the right combination of simplicity, leverage, and accessibility comes along, liquidity flows in droves. I suspect the first adopters of equity perps will be the same retail crowd currently trading 0DTEs and institutions looking for additional basis trade yield.

As on-chain liquidity deepens and regulatory clarity emerges, these products could expand to the masses by finding a home on platforms like Robinhood or even mainstream brokerages. As the lines between traditional and crypto finance blur, this blend of 0DTE adrenaline and perpetual flexibility might just become the next big speculative playground. Whether you view that as progress or as a casino moving on-chain is up to you. Either way, the rails are being built, and I'm anticipating this space to grow a lot.

This is my breakout product prediction for 2026.

Good luck out there.