By There is an important limitation to the “everything-exchange” story.
The front end may be converging faster than the financial system behind it.
Coinbase’s U.S. stock offering, for example, is provided through Coinbase Capital Markets, its broker-dealer, while crypto services are provided separately. Stocks can appear beside crypto in the application and customers can move between them relatively smoothly, but the regulatory status and protections attached to the assets remain different.
Kraken has a similar structure. Conventional U.S. equities are brokerage products, European equities are offered under MiFID II authorization, and xStocks are tokenized representations governed by another set of rules and geographical restrictions.
That suggests the first successful version of the everything exchange may not actually be one exchange. It may be a common distribution and collateral layer sitting above several regulated financial businesses.
To the customer, that distinction can become almost invisible. To regulators, clearinghouses and platform operators, it remains fundamental.
This is where the industry’s consumer experience and its legal architecture are moving at very different speeds.
In the first part of this feature, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, OKX US CEO Roshan Robert, and Binance Head of Exchange and Trading Shunyet Jan discussed how this convergence could reshape market access, liquidity and capital efficiency, while further blurring the boundaries between crypto exchanges, traditional brokers and multi-asset trading platforms. Catch up on the first part here.
Perpetual Futures May Be the Bigger Disruption
Tokenized stocks attract attention because they make the convergence visible. Perpetual futures may ultimately be more disruptive.
A perpetual contract gives a trader synthetic price exposure without requiring ownership of the underlying asset and without a conventional expiration date. Funding mechanisms are generally used to keep the contract anchored to its reference market.
Crypto traders already understand the product. That makes extending perps from bitcoin into Nvidia, the S&P 500, gold, oil or EUR/USD a relatively small behavioral jump.
The volumes are becoming harder to dismiss. CoinGecko calculated that perpetual futures tied to real-world assets generated roughly $347 billion of trading volume in May 2026. Monthly tokenized-equity perpetual volume across the exchanges it tracked reached approximately $34 billion, almost 40 times its July 2025 level.
That remains small relative to underlying traditional equity markets — CoinGecko put tokenized-equity activity at less than 1% of traditional stock-market volume — but the direction matters.
For FX and CFD brokers, the overlap is particularly uncomfortable. Economically, a stock, index, commodity or FX perpetual can solve many of the same problems as a CFD: leveraged exposure, no requirement to own the reference asset and the ability to go long or short.
The plumbing is different. A retail CFD is generally an OTC contract between the client and broker, with spreads, financing charges and the broker’s execution model determining much of the economics. A perpetual can instead trade through an exchange-style order book with a transparent market price, continuously adjusted funding and crypto or stablecoin collateral.
For a generation of traders already accustomed to crypto derivatives, the perpetual may feel more natural than the CFD.
Regulators have noticed the similarity. In February, ESMA specifically warned firms about the increasing use of products marketed as “perpetual futures” or “perpetual contracts,” saying instruments meeting the definition of CFDs remain subject to existing CFD restrictions including leverage limits, margin close-out rules and negative-balance protection.
That is an important signal. Product terminology may change faster than regulation does.
Hong Yea, Co-Founder and CEO of crypto exchange GRVT, told FinanceFeeds that the “everything exchange” thesis is no longer hypothetical for crypto-native venues already extending perpetual markets into traditional assets.
Yea points to three forces behind the move into multi-asset venues. “First, crypto-native traders who already hold USDT on-chain want exposure to Tesla, gold, or the S&P without leaving their wallet, going through KYC at a separate broker, and settling in a different currency,” he noted. “They want one margin account for everything.”
The second driver is the product structure itself. “The perpetual futures product model is asset-agnostic,” Yea said. “A delta-one linear contract on any underlying is mechanically the same whether the underlying is BTC or TSLA.”
That makes adding new asset classes less about rebuilding the exchange and more about deciding what to list. “Adding a new asset class is a listing decision, not a new trading engine,” he said.
The third factor is competition. “The crypto exchange market is brutally crowded, and asset diversification is one of the few moats left,” Yea added.
Yea also sees revenue diversification, retention, and control of the trading relationship as connected, but not equal.
“All three,” he said when asked whether the end goal is revenue diversification, retention, or owning the full financial relationship. “But retention is the strongest pull.”
“A trader who gets their equity exposure, commodity hedge, and crypto speculation in one place has no reason to fragment their capital across four platforms,” Yea said.
Revenue then follows the activity. “If a trader’s crypto positions are flat but gold is moving, you still capture their activity,” he noted.
GRVT’s own data shows how much of this behaviour is already multi-asset. In August 2026, Yea said, 918 unique accounts traded non-crypto instruments on the platform, including US equities, Korean equities, commodities, ETFs, and FX. Of those, 673 also traded crypto in the same month.
Crypto-Native Venues Have an Edge Over Legacy Brokers
Yea argues that 24/7 trading, tokenization, and perpetual futures give crypto-native platforms advantages that are hard for traditional brokers to copy quickly.
“Yes, in ways that are hard for legacy brokers to replicate quickly,” he told FinanceFeeds.
The first difference is time. “24/7 markets matter most for event-driven exposure,” Yea said. “Earnings, geopolitical news, and crypto-market events don’t respect NYSE hours, and our traders can act on them at 3am on a Sunday.”
The second difference is how the product works. “Perpetual futures offer leverage and seamless long/short switching without borrowing shares or managing options chains,” he said.
The third is how the account, collateral, and risk system fit together. Tokenization matters, but he does not see it as the main sales pitch.
“Tokenization is the enabler but not the selling point,” he said. “The selling point is one account, one currency, one risk system, all assets.”
By contrast, he sees traditional brokers as limited by older market rails. “Traditional brokers are structurally constrained by T+1 settlement, market-hours-only trading, and siloed product lines,” Yea said, citing “equities desk vs. FX desk vs. futures desk” as the older model crypto-native venues are trying to move beyond.
Yea believes perpetual futures are already competing with CFDs for leveraged exposure to FX, equities, commodities, and indices. “This is already happening,” he said.
Both products serve a similar need: directional exposure without owning the underlying asset.
“Perpetuals and CFDs serve a similar customer need: leveraged directional exposure without owning the underlying,” Yea said.
But he argues that perpetuals have clear product advantages. “Perpetuals have structural advantages: transparent funding rates rather than opaque overnight financing, on-chain settlement, no broker-dealer counterparty risk if the venue uses a transparent matching model, and a global 24/7 market that doesn’t fragment by jurisdiction in the way CFD regulation does.”
Asked how serious the threat is to established FX, CFD, and stockbroking businesses, Yea is direct. “It’s accelerating, though asymmetric across segments,” he told FinanceFeeds.
CFD brokers, in his view, are the most exposed. “CFD brokers are the most directly threatened,” he said. “Perpetuals are a better product for the same customer, and crypto-native venues can compete with tighter spreads and more transparent funding.”
The challenge to traditional stockbrokers is slower because equity perps do not give users share ownership. But for leveraged traders, Yea believes the appeal is already clear.
“Traditional stockbrokers face a slower-moving threat because equity perps are still derivative exposure,” he said. “You don’t own shares.”
Still, the value proposition is strong for one of the most profitable user segments. “For the leveraged-trading demographic that drives a disproportionate share of retail broker revenue, the value proposition is compelling.”
Yea acknowledges that traditional brokers still have advantages in actual share ownership, dividends, corporate actions, and regulatory protections. But he argues those gaps are narrowing as venues add spot and tokenized equity products.
“The threat isn’t that every stockbroker disappears,” he said. “It’s that the high-margin, high-frequency trading revenue migrates to venues with better market structure.”
Why Users May Care Less About the Venue Label
Yea expects users to care less about whether a platform is called a crypto exchange, broker, or traditional exchange. “Less and less,” he said.
In his view, the user test is practical. “Customers likely would care more about five things: can I trade what I want, when I want, with leverage if I need it, at a good price, with my money safe?”
The label matters less than the experience and access. “The label on the venue is secondary,” Yea said.
For Yea, regulation remains the biggest obstacle to the everything exchange model. “Regulatory is the gating constraint,” he said.
Offering perpetuals on US equities to global users sits in a difficult area. “Some regulators treat it as a derivative, some as a CFD equivalent, and some haven’t addressed it at all,” Yea explained.
Liquidity is the second challenge. Around-the-clock access does not automatically create deep markets at every hour. “Order book depth on a TSLA perpetual at 2am UTC will never match the NYSE at market open,” he said. Venues therefore need “robust market-making to keep spreads tight around the clock.”
Infrastructure, by comparison, is less of a barrier. “Infrastructure is largely solved,” Yea said. “Modern exchange matching engines can handle the throughput.”
The harder task is managing risk across unrelated asset classes inside one account. “Risk management across asset classes is non-trivial,” he added. “A portfolio margin system that understands correlations between BTC, NVDA, and gold is harder to build than one that only handles crypto-crypto pairs.”
The Everything Exchange Is Really the Everything Portfolio
Always-on trading is often presented as the clearest advantage crypto infrastructure has over traditional finance.
It is a real advantage, but not a free one. Crypto-native systems were built around assets that do not have an official closing bell. The technology, risk engines and customer behavior were therefore designed around continuous markets from the beginning.
Applying that model to equities creates a more difficult problem. That creates additional price discovery, but it cannot manufacture liquidity in the underlying shares.
A Nvidia perpetual trading on Sunday is therefore partly a market in expectations about where Nvidia shares will trade when the underlying cash market reopens. Liquidity can thin, spreads can widen and the derivative can move away from its reference price before arbitrageurs regain direct access to the underlying market.
The same issue applies to commodities and, to a lesser extent, weekend FX products. Tokenization makes an asset transferable around the clock. It does not guarantee that the underlying market has become equally liquid around the clock.
For leveraged products, that distinction matters because thin liquidity and sharp basis movements can trigger liquidations before the reference market itself has reopened. The competitive advantage is therefore not simply “24/7 beats market hours.”
It is whether platforms can build credible liquidity, index methodology, market making and risk controls during periods when the underlying market is unavailable.
Travis McGhee, Global Head of Digital Markets at Apex Fintech Solutions, told FinanceFeeds that the race toward multi-asset venues is not new. In his view, the industry is catching up to how investors already think.
“This isn’t a new race,” McGhee said. “It’s the industry finally catching up to the investor.”
The reason is simple: users no longer separate markets in the same way platforms do. “People already live in a multi-asset world in their minds,” he said. “They don’t see a hard line between stocks and crypto, so they expect their platforms to operate the same way.”
For McGhee, the timing is tied to infrastructure catching up with user expectations. “The technology is now mature enough to make that seamless experience a reality.”
McGhee does not frame the end goal as control over the customer. He sees it as becoming central to the investor’s financial activity. “It’s less about control and more about becoming indispensable,” he said.
A platform that brings every asset into one place becomes more than a trading venue. “When you provide a single, unified platform for every asset, you’re not just a place to trade,” McGhee told FinanceFeeds. “You’re the foundational layer of your customer’s entire financial life.”
That naturally supports deeper relationships. “That naturally leads to higher retention and a deeper relationship,” he added.
McGhee sees 24/7 trading, tokenization, and perpetual futures as important, but not as an automatic win for crypto-native platforms. “They offer a glimpse of the future,” he said, “but it’s not a simple plug-and-play advantage.”
The real advantage, in his view, is not only the product. It is the infrastructure underneath. “While 24/7 trading is a powerful concept,” McGhee said, “the real structural advantage comes from building on modern, API-first infrastructure from day one.”
That creates a gap between older and newer operating models. “Legacy brokers are struggling to bolt on these features,” he said, “while crypto-natives are built on them.”
Still, McGhee cautions that crypto-native firms face their own challenges when they move into traditional assets. “Just like legacy brokers may have some challenges ahead of them as it relates to technological upgrades,” he said, “crypto-native firms will have their own unique challenges as they navigate the complex regulatory environment of traditional assets.”
Asked whether perpetual futures could compete with CFDs as a route to leveraged exposure across FX, equities, commodities, and indices, McGhee was direct.
“Of course,” he said.
His reasoning is based on trader behaviour rather than product labels. “Traders will most always gravitate toward the product that offers the most efficient access, liquidity, and leverage for their strategy,” McGhee said.
“If perpetual futures can provide that in a regulated and accessible way,” he told FinanceFeeds, “they absolutely have the potential to become a serious competitor to existing derivatives.”
He points to crypto perps as an early example. “We are already seeing signs of this overseas with the exploding demand in crypto perpetuals since 2021.”
The Threat to Brokers Is Inaction
For McGhee, the competitive risk to established FX, CFD, and stockbroking firms is not only about crypto exchanges or new asset classes. “The threat isn’t from a specific company or related to a specific asset class,” he said. “Rather it’s from inaction.”
The problem is legacy infrastructure. “Established brokers who are tied to legacy infrastructure will find it incredibly difficult to compete with the speed and flexibility of modern platforms,” McGhee said.
His answer is not that every firm must rebuild everything internally. The stronger route, in his view, is partnership. “The firms that will thrive are the ones that partner with technology providers to bridge the gap,” he said, allowing them to offer new products “without having to rebuild their entire stack from scratch.”
McGhee expects customers to care less about whether they are using a crypto exchange, broker, or traditional exchange if the account gives them broad access. “Ultimately, no,” he said. “Investors want a seamless experience.”
For users, the structure of the asset may matter less than the ability to access it easily. “They won’t care if an asset is a fractional share or a token,” McGhee told FinanceFeeds, “as long as they can own a piece of something they believe in through a single, intuitive interface.”
That is why he prefers a different framing for the model. “The ‘everything exchange’ is really the ‘everything portfolio,’” McGhee said, “and the winner will be whoever makes that experience the most frictionless.”
McGhee also sees convergence between crypto platforms and traditional finance as a two-way process. “It’s a convergence,” he said, “so end of day it’s a combination of both.”
Traditional finance, in his view, will adopt more of crypto’s operating model. “Traditional finance will adopt the speed, accessibility, and 24/7 mindset of crypto-native infrastructure,” McGhee said.
Crypto platforms, meanwhile, will need to borrow from regulated markets. “Successful crypto platforms will have to embrace the robust compliance and regulatory frameworks of traditional markets.”
His final answer was cut off after: “The end result won’t look exactly like…”
Crypto Is Becoming Part of Traditional Finance
Konstantin Zaitcev, Co-CEO of P2P.org, told FinanceFeeds that the move by crypto platforms into multi-asset services reflects a deeper change in how the industry thinks about Web3 and traditional finance.
“It’s a good example of the paradigm changing,” Zaitcev said. “Previously we lived in a world with TradFi and Web3, and for some reason we considered Web3 a standalone market, full of anarchists and so on.”
That separation, in his view, is disappearing as blockchain infrastructure becomes more mature and more familiar to institutions. “What we see now is a kind of natural shift,” he said. “Blockchain technology is close to being mature enough and has already onboarded some big names.”
Zaitcev argues that Web3 should no longer be treated as a separate financial universe. “More and more people start to realise that Web3 isn’t a separate market,” he said. “It’s just the market, where some old players have already onboarded new technologies and others are still waiting for something.”
His view is that blockchain will be absorbed into mainstream financial services rather than remain outside them. “Eventually the blockchain technologies and protocols that were built over the last decade will just be part of TradFi,” Zaitcev told FinanceFeeds, “or will themselves become ‘TradFi’, in the sense of ‘financial services that onboarded blockchain technologies’.”
Zaitcev sees the push into multi-asset venues as being driven by money flows and the need to reach new users. “Everything is led by money flows,” he said.
Protocols that began as crypto-native businesses now need broader distribution. “Protocols that started as purely crypto need to grow,” Zaitcev said, “and for that they need to onboard new clients.”
That leaves them with two choices. “They have only two options,” he said: “be heavily integrated into traditional finance tooling, or become such tooling.”
For Zaitcev, the largest prize is the end-user interface. “The ultimate goal, and the biggest win, is if some of these protocols become the entry point for the end user and provide all the needed services from one UI, no matter crypto or not,” he said. “It’s just logical.”
Zaitcev also believes the case for 24/7, tokenized markets has already been made by newer financial apps. “I think Robinhood already answered this question quite well,” he told FinanceFeeds.
Crypto-native infrastructure has long argued for on-chain, around-the-clock markets, but Zaitcev says the idea becomes more powerful when a mature player with a large user base adopts it. “We have been talking about it for years,” he said. “These guys had the user base and showed us what it looks like when a mature player steps into the game.”
His conclusion is direct: “The future of finance is 100% on-chain, 24/7 and tokenized.”
Zaitcev does not expect users to care much about whether they are using a crypto exchange, broker, or traditional exchange if the service solves the same problem. “They won’t,” he said.
For users, the venue label matters less than access, cost, and ease of use. “It doesn’t matter what you use if it solves your problem in the most convenient and cost-effective way.”
That is why Zaitcev expects the next generation of financial platforms to blend crypto and traditional market infrastructure. “Crypto isn’t a revolution,” he said. “It’s an evolution of traditional finance.”
The likely outcome, in his view, is not one side fully replacing the other.
“It will be a mix,” Zaitcev told FinanceFeeds. “The new leaders in financial services will combine the best from the two worlds.”