Wall Street Assets Take Nearly A Quarter Of Crypto Perpetual Trading: Glassnode Report

On Saturday, Bitcoin (BTC) saw a decline to $80,000 as traditional financial instruments, including stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), indices, gold, and oil, began to dominate trading on cryptocurrency exchanges. A report from Glassnode and Fasanara Digital revealed that perpetual futures linked to these traditional assets accounted for 23.5% of trading volume in August, a significant increase from just 0.5% in November of the previous year.

Perpetual futures are a type of derivative that do not have an expiration date, allowing traders to maintain leveraged positions indefinitely. The volume of these contracts related to traditional assets surged from 0.5% of the total trading on six major exchange groups in November 2025 to 23.5% by August 2026. In August alone, approximately $778 billion in these futures were traded, a stark rise from $23.5 billion recorded in November.

During the same timeframe, trading in cryptocurrency perpetuals dropped by 49%, contributing to the increased share of traditional assets. Even if the cryptocurrency trading volume had remained at November's levels, traditional assets would still have constituted 13.5% of the total in August, according to the report. The authors indicated that their calculations are conservative and included contracts that could not be classified as either crypto or traditional assets in the crypto category.

Bitcoin was the most actively discussed asset on Stocktwits, although its price had fallen by more than 2% in the last 24 hours. Retail sentiment surrounding BTC on Stocktwits remained in the 'bearish' category, with overall discussion levels remaining low throughout the day.

Binance (BNB) introduced its first perpetual futures contract in December 2025, and by August, it accounted for approximately 55% of the total volume, translating to $429 billion. Following Binance, OKX held just over 15% of the market, while Hyperliquid (HYPE) captured about 11%. Notably, traditional assets represented a larger portion of Hyperliquid's business, constituting 35.2% of all perpetual trading volume on its platform in August, compared to 27.6% on Binance.

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 system, which became operational in October 2025, allows users to create perpetual markets for any asset with a reliable price source. Markets listed on trade.xyz, an exchange utilizing this system, have achieved 85% of the trading volume of Hyperliquid's Bitcoin perpetual contracts, a significant increase from less than 10% at the beginning of the year. The same types of perpetual contracts have topped trading charts across various platforms, including stocks in the semiconductor industry, leveraged ETFs focused on Korea, and commodities like gold, silver, and crude oil.

The report also examined Bitcoin's price movements in relation to the U.S. Treasury's announcement to increase the maximum size of long-dated bond buybacks from $2 billion to a minimum of $4 billion. Following this news, Bitcoin's price surged by 25% within that week, while gold prices rose and stock values declined. Since that time, Bitcoin's trading behavior has increasingly mirrored that of gold, with their correlation peaking on September 11 at the highest level recorded since the data collection began in March 2018, according to the report.

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