Every exchange is a "Universal Exchange."

Article Author: Prathik Desai

Article Compiled by: Block unicorn

Markets are constantly evolving, which is their inherent nature. They eventually surpass the products they were originally designed for. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), established in 1898, initially focused on trading butter and eggs, later evolving into the world's largest derivatives market. Amazon also started by building warehouses and payment systems to sell paperback books. Today, the same system no longer cares about what they are selling. Books may now be just a trivial part of Amazon's revenue.

This model still applies today. You initially build infrastructure for something, then discover it can also be used for many other things, and then you continuously expand your business to accommodate everything the infrastructure can support.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are experiencing this moment.

The infrastructure they built for trading tokens is equally applicable to trading crude oil, silver, stock indices, pre-IPO stocks, or event contracts. In the past seven months, non-cryptocurrency perpetual contracts accounted for 99% of all trading volume, and this permissionless trading market did not exist two years ago.

This market model is everywhere. Every exchange is competing to transform into a multi-asset broker, and blockchain technology provides the most economical way to achieve this.

The Cheapest Path

Perpetual futures contracts or prediction market contracts do not care whether the underlying asset is Bitcoin or crude oil. You just need a wallet funded with stablecoins to buy a futures contract for some meme coin or to bet on Apple's quarterly earnings results. The trading platform itself does not care about the underlying asset. Just as the internet and logistics networks do not care about what goods are being traded on Amazon's marketplace.

But why would traders abandon existing trading venues to trade silver and stocks on an exchange that has only been established for a few years? The reason is the same as why people choose online trading: convenience and cost savings.

Amazon cut out the middleman, allowing distant sellers to ship directly to buyers. This enabled sellers to beat competitors by offering subsidized prices. At the same time, buyers can easily browse a vast array of products from home (or anywhere else), add items to their cart, and complete payment.

While the cost advantages provided by blockchain were initially built for cryptocurrency trading, they also apply to stock settlement, commodity clearing, and cross-border stock trading.

The around-the-clock real-time markets on blockchain also allow global traders to price events at any time. In recent months, we have repeatedly witnessed their impact on non-crypto assets.

Since October 2025, Hyperliquid's permissionless market (HIP-3) has processed approximately $270 billion in trades across seven developer-deployed trading venues. Of this, 99% of the trades came from commodities, stocks, forex, stock indices, and pre-IPO contracts. Cryptocurrency trading volume has consistently remained below 1%. Moreover, the asset portfolio continues to diversify every month.

On the last weekend of February this year, as the conflict between the U.S. and Iran escalated, the world's largest commodity exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), closed. However, Hyperliquid's WTI crude oil perpetual contracts remained open. In just three weekends, the platform's trading volume surged from $25 million to over $550 million. According to a recent report from TD Securities, before the CME reopened on Monday, Hyperliquid had already absorbed about 80% of the subsequent volatility in WTI crude oil prices.

Earlier this year, during a rise in precious metal prices, the daily trading volume of silver perpetual contracts even approached $1 billion. Even when traditional markets were closed, blockchain-based trading platforms continued to trade.

This phenomenon is not unique to criminals; the same phenomenon exists in stock trading.

U.S. stocks account for over 60% of the global stock market value. For most investors around the world, purchasing U.S. stocks requires going through intermediaries, exchanging currencies, meeting minimum account balance requirements, and facing restrictions on account types.

Everyone wants a piece of the action and to participate in the growth story of the world's largest economy. This explains why almost all cryptocurrency exchanges want traders to buy and sell U.S. stocks or derivatives based on U.S. stocks.

On June 1, Binance announced a zero-commission trading service for 7,000 U.S.-listed stocks for its 300 million registered users, offering fractional share trading starting at $5. The vast majority of users are located outside the U.S. and can now invest in U.S. stocks through their stablecoin wallets.

Kraken's xStocks has demonstrated how tokenization affects investors' access to publicly traded stocks. The platform has tokenized over 100 publicly traded stocks, with a trading volume of $25 billion and 80,000 on-chain holders.

Blockchain can also unlock the price discovery mechanism for pre-IPO stocks in traditional markets. SpaceX is preparing for the largest IPO in history, expected to raise about $75 billion. On June 1, Anthropic secretly submitted its IPO application. OpenAI may follow suit. Before these companies go public, the price discovery mechanism is not transparent and limited to qualified investors.

In the book "Private Asset Pricing," I explain how the market prices assets that behave like public companies.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have brand recognition, scalable revenue, and millions of users. They have everything a public company has, except for public shareholders. Their marketing strategies ensure that everyone has their own opinion about them. In fact, SpaceX's success rate is unprecedented, and almost everyone has their own opinion about it, yet very few can truly assess its value.

Blockchain provides various tools for the market to price these private companies.

For example, many platforms that were initially cryptocurrency exchanges now offer perpetual contracts, prediction market contracts, and tokenized IPO access for companies that are not yet publicly listed.

Multiple market makers on the Hyperliquid platform provide perpetual contracts for companies like SpaceX, Cerebra, and Anthropic. In the past six months, the trading volume of these contracts has grown about 300 times, soaring from $16 million to $4.7 billion. In May, these pre-IPO stock perpetual contracts accounted for 7.7% of the total trading volume of HIP-3, while this proportion was only 0.2% in December 2025.

These trading venues are not only always open and offer lower prices, but also provide ample liquidity that traders can trust.

During the escalation of the situation in Iran, Hyperliquid's WTI crude oil futures contracts had an average daily trading volume of hundreds of millions of dollars, with very small spreads. From January to April 2026, the open interest in WTI crude oil futures contracts surged from $1.8 million to $560 million.

Traditional exchanges can also leverage user deposits to offer cross-margin trading and deep liquidity. Binance, through its integration with PreStocks, allows users to participate in pre-IPO stock trading; while Payward (the parent company of Kraken) allows users to invest in tokenized IPOs.

Less than 24 hours ago, Coinbase also joined Kraken and Binance in launching malicious contracts for pre-IPO stocks, with the first stock being SpaceX.

Building a Full-Stack Fintech

The bidirectional integration of traditional finance and cryptocurrency is creating a full-stack fintech platform for many companies. On one hand, cryptocurrency-native platforms are expanding traditional asset classes; on the other hand, traditional exchanges are rapidly adopting blockchain infrastructure.

In the cryptocurrency space, Kraken has spent over $2.7 billion on acquisitions in the past 12 months, transforming into a multi-asset broker. In March 2025, the company acquired injaTrader for $1.5 billion, the largest acquisition of a futures commission merchant registered with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to date.

Subsequently, the company acquired Backed Finance, achieving autonomous control over the issuance, trading, and settlement of xStocks. By early 2026, its product offerings grew from 60 tokenized stocks to 100. The company then made five acquisitions in the fields of payment, clearing, and automated trading infrastructure.

Following that, the company launched Krak, a payment application supporting over 300 assets across 160 countries, helping users spend, send, and earn with cryptocurrency.

Coinbase has also launched a similar product suite.

At the product launch in December 2025, Coinbase introduced commission-free stock trading covering all 50 states in the U.S. and launched a prediction market through Kalshi.

In August 2025, Coinbase acquired Deribit for $2.9 billion, gaining control of the world's largest cryptocurrency options market. Today, Coinbase is positioning USDC and its Layer-2 chain Base as a settlement platform for various transactions, from agency payments to stock trading.

These platforms have entered the financial sector through cryptocurrency and now possess distribution networks that traditional financial giants have spent decades building. Binance has 300 million registered users, while Kraken serves 15 million customers across 190 countries. Such a large user base is their greatest moat in expanding multi-asset brokerage businesses.

When Binance launched 7,000 U.S. stocks, it did not need to build demand from scratch. The purchasing channels for these stocks and pre-IPO stocks are open to users who have already recharged stablecoins multiple times and completed identity verification. For an existing cryptocurrency broker, the marginal cost of adding stock trading is far lower than the cost for traditional brokers to acquire a new customer.

Traditional companies are also actively adjusting themselves to remain competitive.

On the same day Binance launched U.S. stock trading, the world's largest derivatives exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, announced that all its cryptocurrency futures and options would operate 24/7.

The DTCC, which manages $114 trillion in assets, will pilot tokenized securities this July and fully roll them out in October. This pilot covers Russell 1000 index constituents, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasury bonds. More than 50 companies, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Circle, are participating in the project.

The New York Stock Exchange has partnered with Securitize to build a 24/7 tokenized stock trading platform. Nasdaq received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March to trade tokenized stocks within its existing trading system.

This is an interesting phenomenon of convergence. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and other traditional financial institutions are implementing around-the-clock operations because cryptocurrencies have proven that markets do not need to close. Cryptocurrency exchanges are also beginning to offer traditional assets—oil, silver, indices—because users have indicated that any platform that can provide ample liquidity and lower-cost information pricing will attract their demand.

Blockchain is becoming a bridge between the two.

The Evolution of Cryptocurrency as Fintech

Like any other technology, there is a binary view in online forums regarding the application prospects of cryptocurrency. They believe that cryptocurrency will either build a completely new, independent financial system or collapse due to its own development. But in reality, the development of cryptocurrency is situated somewhere in between. The history of the internet's development is similar.

When people were still debating the merits of the internet or viewing it as the dawn of a new world, the internet gradually commoditized and eventually became ubiquitous, with almost the entire world relying on it to operate. Today, people no longer argue about the utility of the internet; it has become a common foundation supporting various emerging technologies.

This is precisely the change I believe is happening in the cryptocurrency space. The technologies related to cryptocurrency may not have realized the initial expectations of the cypherpunks. I doubt most of them even care; at least I do not.

While the internal market is busy discussing Bitcoin cycles and downturns, an external market is steadily expanding across multiple levels of the financial system. Payment infrastructure, agency commerce, integrated price discovery platforms, and now multi-asset brokerage businesses are thriving, regardless of whether the price of Bitcoin is $60,000 or $100,000.

Charlie Booth of Hepworth Iron Capital provided an excellent explanation of the endogenous-exogenous market evolution in a guest commentary published last week in Token Dispatch.

What interests me most is that a technology originally used for trading tokens is now being used to allow retail investors to acquire $5 worth of Apple stock on Saturdays, settled in stablecoins, with fees under 1 cent, all built on the infrastructure initially designed for meme coins.

Such possibilities only arise when the new infrastructure far surpasses the old infrastructure it replaces. We all know that old habits are hard to change. And the world is discovering that blockchain is the panacea for improving financial operations. In some cases, blockchain works by lubricating traditional financial systems; in others, it works by completely replacing outdated systems. Changing for the sake of change is not a wise move.

For any industry operated by humans, resisting changes that can improve the way existing systems operate is tantamount to suicide. This is because humans have an inherent desire to improve inefficient systems. Anything that can enhance system efficiency will be adopted, no matter how novel or radical it may seem. The development of blockchain technology is in a field with immense room for improvement, effectively reducing such inefficiencies. Traditional institutions and markets like Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are all adopting blockchain technology, which fully demonstrates the increasingly important role blockchain will play in the future of finance.

Now every exchange is a broker (or will soon become one). Not all exchanges anticipated this, but this is exactly what they want to become. What will happen next? When every platform offers stocks, derivatives, prediction markets, and cryptocurrencies on the same application, who will be the ultimate winner? The key lies in how they integrate these assets into their respective platforms and enable users to perform some of the most basic operations in finance: spending, transferring, receiving, and earning money.