A year ago, 100% of Bitget’s trading volume came purely from crypto assets. Today, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen revealed that 28% of her platform’s volume comes from traditional stock perpetual contract trading. This is a reverse bridge phenomenon: if previously ETF products were tasked with bringing crypto to Wall Street, now crypto exchanges are drawing stocks, indices, and commodities into their ecosystem through perpetual futures (perps).
This shifting figure is not just a passing trend on a single exchange, but a new direction for the industry to accommodate all types of financial assets.
Official Licenses and Contract Volume Surge
CoinGecko’s report noted that crypto platforms registered around 360 traditional financial assets during the period from January 2025 to May 2026. Out of that number, exchanges offered an average of 75 traditional asset perp contracts, far outperforming spot listings which stopped at just 37 assets. The concrete result is seen in the trading volume of tokenized stock-perps, which rose from $831 million in July 2025 to $34 billion in May 2026. While this figure is indeed still below 1% of the total volume of the actual underlying stocks, the flow of capital migration is picking up speed through formal licensing steps taken by major players.
S&P Dow Jones Indices recently licensed the S&P 500 to the Trade XYZ platform on the Hyperliquid blockchain. This approval makes it the first officially approved on-chain S&P 500 perp contract for users outside the United States. In the UK, Coinbase also received the green light from the FCA under MiFID rules, allowing them to offer traditional stocks to retail investors alongside perp contracts to institutions. Meanwhile, Binance opted for a trial path by allowing wealthy clients to use their tokenized stock positions as collateral when trading other assets.
For Whom is This Bridge Being Built?
The ultimate goal of this series of expansions boils down to the ambition of becoming an “everything exchange” - a platform where users can trade crypto, stocks, perps, and real-world assets within a single account. The appeal of this hybrid platform takes two different forms depending on the user’s profile. For institutional clients, the main allure is not ease of access. They usually already have their own brokers and OTC desks, so they switch to crypto exchanges purely to cut down transaction friction and consolidate their portfolios.
Conversely, for retail investors outside US jurisdiction, crypto exchanges provide genuine access that has long been blocked by national borders. Through this route, they finally gain the freedom to have direct exposure to targeted Wall Street products like Tesla stock or the S&P 500 index.
For retail traders, this 24-hour non-stop access ends the necessity to split their capital across multiple applications. As conventional instruments shift direction and come to rest on crypto exchanges, stocks no longer know market closing bells, and the only remaining control lies in the trader’s discipline to manage risk.
As reported by CoinDesk.
Also read: How to Read Candlesticks for Beginners
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only, not financial advice. Cryptocurrency assets are highly volatile and carry significant risk. Always do your own research (DYOR) and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
