News Summary

• Perpetual futures, also called perpetual swaps or “perps” for short, are leverage-friendly contracts that never expire.
• They now account for roughly 93% of all crypto futures volume, with daily perp volume routinely running larger than the spot market underneath it.
• A body of market-microstructure work has asked which venue "discovers" a bitcoin price first, meaning where new information enters the market before it shows up anywhere else.
• But the direction of the literature over the past few years has been toward the derivatives market as the place where the price is made.