Three years in the writing, this is the untold story of how crypto's hottest derivative came to be.
TLDR: A derivative sketched in the back of a Shanghai taxi may now be one of the most important dollar-liquidity benchmarks central bankers aren’t watching.
Perpetual futures, originally designed to solve a crypto-market plumbing issue, now dominate leveraged trading. They’re collateralized in BTC, crypto, or stablecoins — but it’s the stablecoin leg that anchors the entire system to real-world dollar liquidity.
That’s why perp funding rates increasingly behave like a market-driven measure of offshore dollar scarcity.
As unsecured funding channels shrink and stablecoins evolve into the new eurodollars, perps now process trillions in trading flows, forming a parallel benchmark that emerged organically — not by committee — and pricing liquidity at the margin, outside the Fed’s control.
The creation story is fascinating.
The implications for monetary transmission and global liquidity are far larger.
Full story below.
thepeg.co/p/long-read-the-un…