Ask how crypto prices are set and many people will still describe the spot market: buyers and sellers meet on an exchange, a trade prints, and that becomes the market price. CoinDesk argues that this has not been the practical reality for years in bitcoin, ether and much of crypto. The center of gravity has shifted to perpetual futures.
Perpetual futures, or perpetual swaps, are contracts built for leveraged trading and they do not expire. The article says they now account for roughly 93% of all crypto futures volume, with daily turnover routinely running above the spot market beneath them.
Where the market finds a bitcoin price first
A traditional futures contract has a settlement date. At expiry, its price is forced to converge with the spot price of the underlying asset. A perpetual contract has no such date and, in principle, can be held indefinitely, though traders pay or receive a funding rate that changes over time.
That structure has made perpetuals central to a long-running market-microstructure question: which venue discovers a bitcoin price first, meaning where new information shows up before it appears elsewhere? The answer in a number of studies has pointed to derivatives markets.
CoinDesk cites a Journal of Financial Markets paper by Carol Alexander and her co-authors. That study found that bitcoin perpetual swaps on unregulated venues were the strongest instruments for price discovery, while regulated futures and U.S. spot exchanges tended to respond to those moves instead of leading them.
Other research has identified Binance’s perpetual market as the main source of price formation across crypto’s fragmented trading venues.
The picture is not fully settled. Some studies still find that spot markets lead at certain frequencies or during periods of stress. Even so, the direction of the literature in recent years has leaned toward the same conclusion: derivatives markets are increasingly where prices get made, with spot markets adjusting afterward.
Funding rates keep perpetuals tied to spot
This is where the funding rate matters. Because a perpetual never settles, there is no expiry event forcing it back toward spot. Instead, every few hours, the more crowded side of the trade pays the other side.
When a perpetual trades above spot, longs, traders betting on higher prices, pay shorts, traders positioned for a decline. That payment mechanism nudges the contract back toward the underlying price.
CoinDesk describes funding as both the tether that anchors the contract and a live reading of market sentiment. For some traders, it deserves as much attention as the price itself.
Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told CoinDesk: “Historically, we have seen perps leading mostly during bear market price rallies. For example, Bitcoin perps demand growth (blue bars in the chart) led the price rallies of January 2026, and April-May 2026.”
He added: “In these periods, spot demand was contracting, while perps demand expanded, thus the perpetual futures market was leading prices despite demand contracting on the spot market.”
Not every trader treats funding as fresh information. Hong Yea, co-founder at onchain trading platform Grvt, told CoinDesk: “We actually surveyed more than 100 of our traders. The traders who actually rely on us to hold real conviction positions want predictability there, not another data point to interpret.”
Yea added: “If you’re holding a directional position for weeks, funding isn’t telling you something new about the market, it’s just eating into your PnL while you wait to be right. That’s the honest way our users describe it to us, not, ‘what is the market telling me.”
The SpaceX pre-IPO market on crypto rails
CoinDesk then turns to a case that pushed this logic well beyond bitcoin and ether. For about three weeks in May and June, one of the most closely watched markets in the world involved a company that had never sold a public share, yet trading in exposure to it was already happening through crypto-style derivatives.
Elon Musk-owned SpaceX priced what the article called a record $75 billion initial public offering at $135 a share and started trading on Nasdaq on June 12. Before that listing, traders on Binance, Coinbase, Hyperliquid and other venues were already buying and selling pre-IPO perpetual futures linked to the company. These contracts tracked an implied valuation rather than an actual share price.
Hyperliquid, the onchain derivatives exchange, moved first, launching a synthetic SpaceX perpetual on May 18. Binance opened its own SpaceX market on May 21. Coinbase followed on June 4. BitMEX, Bitget and OKX later listed their own versions.
The notable part was how accurate those markets looked at the only moment when their pricing could be tested directly. On the night before SpaceX listed, perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid and Binance were implying roughly $170 a share, well above the $135 IPO price set by the underwriters.
The next day, SPCX opened, traded to an intraday high above $176, and finished its first session at $161, a 19% gain. In CoinDesk’s telling, the stock traded almost exactly where perpetuals had placed it, and a market dominated by leverage-seeking retail traders read first-day demand more accurately than the banks that had spent months building the offer price.
The gap also created the trade. Because perpetual markets were pricing SpaceX well above the $135 IPO price, traders could buy the contract before listing and bet that the two would converge. CoinDesk says each contract was structured to switch automatically to SpaceX’s real share price the moment the stock began trading, so any difference between the perp price and the opening market price would close on its own. With the IPO already four times oversubscribed, the article says the direction was rarely in doubt, and the pre-listing window was the only place to put on that position.
Strong on demand, weak on supply
Then the market met a variable the perpetual contract could not fully price: supply. CoinDesk says SPCX has fallen more than 40% from its June peak and was trading at about $115 at the time of publication, down from the $135 IPO price.
The article ties that move to the limited amount of stock sold in the IPO and to a coming unlock. Only a small portion of SpaceX shares was sold in the offering, and starting around Aug. 6, roughly 900 million locked-up insider shares become eligible for sale.
That, in CoinDesk’s view, is what the SpaceX case showed in exaggerated form: the same point many studies already make about ordinary crypto trading. Derivatives markets are increasingly where price discovery happens. Spot follows.
Perpetuals are very good at pricing demand and poor at pricing supply. CoinDesk says that is worth remembering whenever a bitcoin rally, or a sharp flush, begins in funding before it reaches spot.