Blockchains Unleash Wave of New Markets on Chain

Blockchains have revolutionized the way markets are created and traded. For most of financial history, the supply of new markets was the bottleneck, but blockchains remove this constraint by making issuance permissionless and distribution global.

This shift in market creation has led to an explosion of net new markets onchain, with categories such as perps, spot DEXs, prediction markets, lending markets, memecoins, NFTs, and tokenized physicals seeing significant growth. Each of these categories represents a new unit of risk or a novel way to transfer existing units of risk.

One of the most effective coordination mechanisms for market creation is perpetual futures, which can exist as long as there are two counterparties willing to take the other side and a robust oracle providing pricing information. The rise of non-crypto volume onchain in perps demonstrates the power of permissionless issuance and global distribution.

The addressable universe of onchain markets is no longer limited to existing assets, but can include any risk that anyone or any agent anywhere wants to trade. This suggests that we will continue to see an explosion of net new markets onchain, including commodities and FX perps, indices, 24/7 equity exposure, compute futures, and perps on macro indicators.