Hello everyone. My name is Meredith, and I'm the CEO of Stork. I am very excited to talk to you about RWA Perpetuals . We build oracle infrastructure for fast markets in DeFi . Every day, more than half of the volume of on-chain perpetual trading occurs through store price feeds.
Thank you for inviting me to EHCOM. Stork offers three products : Price Feeds, Prediction Markets, Data, and Research. All of this is very important for what I'm going to say today. These are the topics we will discuss today. First, let's look at how the RWA perpetual market has grown and what's causing it .
Next, let's get into the mechanics - I'll explain what you're actually trading when you trade commodity, index, equity, or pre-IPO perpetuals on weekends. Finally, let's explore why pricing is a key factor if this market is to reach its potential . First, let's look at how we got here with RWA perpetuals development, oil, gold, and indices . Let's start with the numbers . The monthly volume of RWA perpetuals has increased tenfold in the last four months.
Perpetual futures on traditional assets existed before, but they did n't have much volume or popularity. One Saturday in late February, war broke out in the Middle East. Key events occurred on weekends throughout the month of March, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the start and break of peace talks . Crypto native traders are ready. RWA perpetuals on WTI oil rose from 76 million in January to 488 million in February.
In March, their monthly volume reached 21.5 billion . The following month, they reached 60.2 billion . Gold, silver, and oil perpetuals dominated RWA perpetual trading in the early development phase of 2026.
At the same time, an exchange operator called Trade XYZ, which is on the hyperliquid platform, is developing its index product . XYZ has listed its own NASDAQ 100 proxy, the XYZ 100 . Later, S&P entered into a licensing agreement with Dow Jones Indices and listed the officially approved S&P 500 Perpetual . Most index perpetuals are unlicensed proxies, but this is a brand name index with a clear chain of custody. The third wave is equities.
AI trades, which have been booming in traditional markets, have shifted to perpetuals, with equity perpetual volume doubling from $25.6 billion to $ 62.8 billion in May alone . AI-related companies like Micron, SanDisk, and Nvidia are at the forefront, but the list is growing. The exchanges we are monitoring have doubled their number of equity listings from 196 in April to 391 by the end of May .
There are currently 569 different RWA perpetual markets. And this is just a fraction of the twelve or so leading exchanges we monitor. Every crypto exchange is doing this now. And it happened very fast . And then last week, the CFTC stepped in .
On May 29, the commission approved Bitcoin perpetual contracts for KHI and allowed Coinbase to serve foreign derivatives markets . They also issued an advisory specifically on 24/7 trading , commodities and indices. This is where things get interesting. The volume is real. Price discovery is underway.
Even when traditional markets are closed. But what exactly are you trading ? For commodities and indices, the short answer is that you are usually trading a proxy . The standard price data for WTI crude comes from the CME . S&P 500 data comes from S&P Dow Jones Indices .
Both are expensive and neither has widely licensed their data for use in perpetual DEXs (DEXs) . So exchanges get WTI futures data from secondary sources, usually trading desks or crypto exchange order books. For indexes, they build their own facsimile index designed to closely track the brand name index . Currently, Store Research tracks four separate NASDAQ 100 proxies and each S&P 500 proxy, each showing a slightly different price. The XYZ S&P 500 contract stands seventh, officially licensed to trade from Dow Jones.
These are not the same products. Additionally, these index perps are not always quoted in dollars, but in stablecoins . That introduces basis risk between USDC, USDT, and USD. And in the case of foreign equity markets, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, you're often trading in dollar-denominated stablecoins, not in yuan, won, or yen . So you are also taking on currency exposure without even knowing it .
Keeping it all that way , this is working. The average weekly index volume in May was 164 million per day. WTI averaged 635 million per day on weekends . These are not small amounts. So how is the WTI perp price determined on a Saturday afternoon when the CME is closed determined on a Saturday afternoon when the CME is closed ?
Here is the mechanism behind this. At the central closing time on Friday at 4pm, the exchange will switch to an internal oracle. That oracle takes the CME closing price as a starting point and carefully changes it based on order book activity on the exchange. The key word is " key word is " conservatively" conservatively" . The algorithm uses impact prices, exponential moving averages, and hard caps on how much the price can move in any given window .
These are intended to be manipulation-resistant methods . The results are really good. On 19 occasions out of 21 weekends in 2026, the WTI market for Trade XYZ on Hyperledger moved with directional accuracy towards the CME Sunday open 90.5% of the time According to Stor Research, Stor has now created 247 oracle methodologies covering four commodities and four major equity markets . Our inputs come from five exchanges.
Binance, Bitget, Hyperliquid Hyperliquid , Litecoin, and OKEx. When you trade in any of these markets over the weekend , your prices will reflect orderbook activity based on the last known trade closing price . Many smaller exchanges also incorporate price updates from TradeXYZ . So really , you could be trading at a price set elsewhere , with your own exchange activity having only a small impact . Pre-IPO perpetuals are a topic that is attracting everyone's attention.
SpaceX, Cerebras, Quantum. These have attracted serious attention both inside and outside crypto. SpaceX was the biggest pre- biggest pre- IPO perpetual perpetual , but AI chip maker Cerebras was the first and caught everyone's attention. In the hours leading up to Cerebras' IPO, the traded XYZ contract on HyperLiquid traded well above the IPO price set the previous night . At the start of trading, Perpetual predicted the opening minute to be within 0.
5% . Investment bankers are really following the perpetual price on their screens . By the end of the day, the share price had fallen to $311 . The markets were excited, but in the end, they were closer to the stock market value than the $185 IPO price set by the underwriters . The second time around, pre-IPO perpetuals didn't look so good.
Traders have raised the pre-IPO perpetual for Continuum, a quantum computing company, to around $100 . Around 6:00 AM on the day of the Continuum IPO, the price started to drop. By the time the stock began trading at 1:34 p.m., coinciding with the start of Nasdaq trading, it had fallen to $68 .
The $54 S-1 price, raised on Monday before the IPO, is closer to actual trading, twice as good as the excited pre-IPO markets . Instead of an IPO pop predictor, it seemed like easy money for smart traders who knew where the price would start . What are you actually trading in pre-IPO perpetuals ? Shares in private companies trade in secondary markets , those prices are passed on to the oracle, but you are trading the orderbook activity of the perpetual , which poses liquidity and manipulation risks . These markets are very small in size.
SpaceX is the largest pre- largest pre- IPO market with a total volume of $1.45 billion as of June 3 . Cerebras Perpetual's pricing mechanism is impressive, with only $23.6 million in trading volume recorded up until the IPO. Quantum is about 40% of that, or $82 million .
For now For now , pre-IPO price recognition, as we saw with Cerebrus, is a possibility, but not a guarantee. All of this points to the same fundamental limitation , the same pricing decision. The oracle infrastructure in Crypto Perpetuals was built to solve a specific problem . Spot markets are separate. Prices vary between different platforms and perpetual exchanges cannot afford data errors.
Even a single incorrect data point can lead to a liquidation that shouldn't have happened. Oracle filters out unnecessary information and reveals the true state of the market . Stork is the first oracle to do this with sub- millisecond latency for perpetual exchanges . We are still doing the same. In RWA this problem is structurally different but more difficult in practice .
During market hours, the price recognition of equities and most commodities takes place on a single, standardized platform . CME for oil, New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ for equities. For American equities, there is a clear answer to the question of what the price is. But outside of those times , on weekends and in pre-IPO markets, there is no standard value. That's where DeFi comes in comes in , accurately conveying prices with low liquidity, proxy indices, and order books .
There is now also a reference to overnight American equity trading . Blue Ocean ATS runs sessions from 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM . It's a low but true spot market, Stork offers those prices to subscribers , but 24/7 is the main value, and there is still a liquidity shortage on weekends. This is the real obstacle to further volume growth. Professional traders are interested in the concept of 24/7 price recognition .
The problem is hedging ( reducing the fear of loss ). Professional trading desks close out their RWA perpetual positions on Fridays . Due to the lack of suitable spot markets to hedge , the risk- reward of weekly RWA perpetuals is not well-balanced. Therefore, the market is limited to retail traders and has low volume . The path forward runs through a few parallel paths.
Tokenized stocks trading 24/7, expansion of overnight and weekend commodity sessions, and deeper pre-IPO secondary markets. All of this requires the same thing at its root: a continuous stream of reliable reference prices on assets worldwide, as well as a disruption in the identification of crypto prices that is entering traditional markets for the first time . This is where Stork focuses. We have designed the latency and uptime profile required for perpetual exchanges for crypto assets. We are now applying the same capabilities to the most difficult parts of RWA perpetuals problems .
Weekends, holidays, and standard pricing are for properties without a venue. Oracle here is not just a passive infrastructure. Thank you.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.