New research by MEXC Ventures and Blockworks Research found that average daily stock futures trading volume surged more than 3,000% in Asia quarter over quarter. In Southeast Asia specifically, that number hit 6,648%.
Open interest in precious metals futures reached $1.98 billion in May 2026, according to the report.
To unpack what is driving the trend, DeFi Rate spoke with Vugar Usi, CEO of MEXC.
The Opportunity Investor
To mark his first 100 days in office, Usi released a letter outlining the company’s priorities. In it, he described today’s retail investors as “opportunity investors.”
“An opportunity investor is asset-agnostic and highly sensitive to access,” Usi told DeFi Rate.
According to the report, among Asian crypto-native respondents, 62.6% primarily trade precious metals through centralized exchanges (CEXs), while over 85% also plan to increase their traditional finance asset trading on such platforms.
Asked whether this could be trend chasing, Usi disagreed.
“A trend gets attention, but an opportunity needs a tradable reason. Price dislocation, earlier access, liquidity, and macro events can all create one,” he said.
According to Usi, individual opportunities, such as a gold rally or a stock surge, will come and go, but the underlying behavior will stay.
Indeed, some of the biggest crypto trends so far this year centered around the practical shift from single-token hype to real-world utility, tokenization, and institutional portfolio integration. a16z crypto‘s own 2026 outlook named perpetual futures as the crypto-native structure best suited to bringing traditional assets on-chain, ahead of more literal, “skeuomorphic” tokenization.
Why futures?
One of the report’s most interesting findings is the gap between spot and futures adoption. Real-world assets (RWAs), forex, and tokenized stocks currently account for less than 2% of spot trading volume on centralized exchanges but over 12% of futures trading volume.
Combined futures trading volume across these three categories in July 2026 approached $400 billion, the highest monthly level recorded during the period covered by the report.
“Futures fit crypto-native trading behavior extremely well. A trader can go long or short, take meaningful exposure with less upfront capital, and keep a position without managing an expiry date,” Usi said.
Spot trading, in comparison, carries a much heavier lift since tokenization, backing, custody, settlement, and ownership claims all have to work properly.
“Futures can scale much faster before that full infrastructure is in place,” he said.
Futures surge year-over-year
This is also consistent with what is happening market-wide. Crypto exchanges processed $1.32 trillion in perpetual futures in the first six months of 2026, according to CoinGecko, a significant surge from the $104.21 billion traded the year before.
According to the report, 75.1% of Asian users say they have experienced a major market-moving event while traditional brokers were closed. Usi said this was the most surprising finding of the entire project.
“I expected strong demand for gold, and I expected Asia to be aggressive in futures,” Usi said. “I did not expect the market-hours problem to be that widespread.”
Usi noted this changed how he thought about 24/7 markets.
“People in crypto have treated round-the-clock access as normal for years,” he said. “Once the same users begin trading gold, equities, and indices, they carry that expectation with them.”
Moreover, 79% of respondents said they would consider using a crypto platform to open a gold or oil position specifically because of an after-hours event. This is especially significant for Asian traders who follow US equities, commodities, or global macro events as traditional US market hours could be hard to follow.
Perps, prediction markets, and the future of finance
Speaking of perpetual futures, Usi noted they have the potential to accelerate spot tokenization.
“A cross-asset market cannot rely on leveraged activity forever,” he said. “From January through July, PAXG spot volume reached $2.02 billion, and futures volume reached $2.03 billion.”
The convergence between perps and prediction market platforms, Usi noted, is a clever business technique that keeps user activity within a single platform.
Asian crypto-native traders have effectively stopped waiting for Bitcoin to move and have started treating centralized exchanges as an all-purpose entry point into the markets that offer the clearest opportunities.
According to the report, demand alone will not be enough; deeper spot liquidity, clearer user education, stronger leverage safeguards, and more reliable weekend pricing are still needed before the market can mature.
The next few months will show whether the new generation of “opportunity investors” stick around once the current run of gold and stock-market volatility cools off, or whether this was simply the moment 24/7 markets became the trend.
