Perpetual Futures Contracts Go Mainstream: Centralized Exchanges Clear $86.2T in Volume
Perpetual futures contracts, known as 'perps,' have become one of the biggest markets in crypto. In 2025, top centralized exchanges cleared $86.2T in perp volume, a 47% increase from the previous year. On-chain perpetuals grew even faster, with leading decentralized exchanges reaching $6.7T (+346% YoY). DEX volume now represents roughly 7.8% of CEX volume, up from about 2.5% just a year earlier.
The idea of perps originated in 1993 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller, but they weren't popularized in crypto until 2016 with the rise of BitMEX and XBTUSD. Modern exchanges now offer perpetual futures contracts on equities, indices, commodities, interest rates, startup valuations, and even Nvidia H100 GPU prices.
Decentralized exchanges have started to eat into centralized exchanges' share of the perp market. With self-custody as a structural advantage, perp DEXs are rapidly narrowing the gap with CEXs in liquidity, performance, and features for active traders.