Perps Called SpaceX's $1.5T IPO to the Penny — Then the Stock Ghosted Them 👻

Perpetual futures, the leverage-friendly contracts with no expiry date, now account for roughly 93% of all crypto futures volume, making them the venue where most price discovery in bitcoin and ether actually happens, according to multiple market-microstructure studies cited in industry research. A traditional futures contract forces convergence with spot at settlement, but a perpetual instead charges a recurring funding rate every few hours between longs and shorts, allowing it to drift independently of the underlying market. Research published in the Journal of Financial Markets by Carol Alexander and co-authors found that perpetual swaps on unregulated venues were the strongest instruments for bitcoin price discovery, with regulated futures and U.S. spot exchanges reacting to, rather than leading, those moves, while other work has identified Binance's perpetual market as the primary source of price formation across the fragmented crypto landscape. Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told CoinDesk that "historically, we have seen perps leading mostly during bear market price rallies," pointing to $BTC perps demand growth leading the price rallies of January 2026 and April-May 2026 while spot demand was contracting. That same derivatives machinery was turned on SpaceX ahead of what became the biggest IPO in history, with traders pricing the private company's valuation more accurately than Wall Street before the listing, only to watch the stock walk away from the perp-implied price once it began trading. The episode underscored how dominant perps have become in setting prices not just for $BTC and $ETH but increasingly for any asset where a leveraged contract exists, with daily perp volume routinely running larger than the spot market underneath it.