Crypto Long and Short: ICE Targets Retail Demand for Fast Trading Results

Updated Nov 4, 2026, 11:50 a.m. EST. Published Nov 4, 2026, 10:27 a.m. EST.

5 min read

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Happy Wednesday,

This is your institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week:

Andy Baehr of GSR on what perpetual futures have in common with football and baseball
Top headlines institutions should pay attention to by Francisco Rodrigues
“Tokenized assets are growing on a flat stablecoin base” in Chart of the Week

Thanks for joining us!

– Kim Klemballa

Why ICE’s Hyperliquid deal is a retail play

by Andy Baehr, managing director, asset management, GSR

Baseball and American football draw enthusiasts through a sequence of separate actions. Every single play builds anticipation and gives a payout before the game resets. Hockey, racing, basketball, and soccer operate in reverse. You watch the countdown of the clock or laps; the excitement occurs whenever it happens.

Regarding financial markets, regular participants show a growing preference for the baseball and football experience, where standalone events bring rapid payoffs. Scholars label the pull of irregular, frequent rewards as “variable-ratio reinforcement.” The rest of us recognize it as dopamine.

The explosive growth of prediction markets serves as the most obvious proof. Kalshi just recorded its greatest month ever, achieving roughly $98 billion in contract volume during October. Same-day expiring options, known as “0DTE,” represent another example. Cash-settled S&P 500 options provided by Cboe, a heavy institutional offering, are now dominated by 0DTE contracts, which represented two-thirds of trading volume in July. Cboe calculates that half of that activity comes from retail traders.

An argument can be made that perpetual contracts, commonly known as perps, which were popularized by digital asset platforms over the past ten years (and viewed by some as among crypto’s most important contributions to finance), fall into that exact category. The participant deposits collateral and opens a trade. Either the user secures a gain or, if the asset price drops far enough in the wrong direction, the position faces liquidation. Liquidations carry no social stigma and typically involve no extra penalty; backstops and insurance funds absorb most deficits. The exchange encourages the client to trade again.

On Oct. 29, Trade[XYZ], a prominent provider of real-world-asset perps on Hyperliquid (a major decentralized perpetuals exchange), and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) reached an agreement to bring those markets onshore inside the United States. ICE will act as the exclusive operator for Trade[XYZ]’s compliant markets and acquire a strategic equity stake. Stan Druckenmiller utilized his debut post on X to state that he is “excited to be an investor in tradeXYZ.” The HYPE token of Hyperliquid advanced roughly 20% on that day, and the agreement attracted widespread, continuous coverage.

This initiative clearly targets retail participants; the announcement explicitly states as much. Typical clients of ICE, who hedge the costs of coffee, cocoa, oil, or cotton, hold zero interest in perpetual swaps. Those users want the exact opposite: securing a fixed rate for a future date. Conventional dated futures align better with their goals.

ICE joins the perpetual futures race through a partnership with OKX focused on retail reach, a roadmap for tokenized equities, and utilization of the NYSE brand and infrastructure. Combining front-end futures commission merchants (FCMs), underlying Hyperliquid technology, and a novel ICE-operated clearing mechanism separated from its institutional clearinghouses could form a competitive setup, letting current U.S. Hyperliquid users transition out of the shadows into a regulated framework that feels relatively familiar. The distinct clearing architecture may also suggest that liquidations there will happen routinely instead of exceptionally, keeping the user experience intact.

Note that none of this demands a cryptocurrency asset. Trade[XYZ] centers on commodities, currencies, and equities. Why complicate onboarding by piling the crypto hurdle on top of the perp hurdle? The demographic wanting to trade traditional commodities or stocks through a perpetual format is likely much bigger.

On Nov. 3, right on schedule, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig announced that individual stock perpetual futures can trade for the first time via CFTC-registered platforms that also maintain notice-registration with the SEC for security futures. ICE Futures U.S. submitted an application for that precise registration on Sept. 30. It stands as the newest illustration of SEC-CFTC harmonization (which, from this author’s perspective, is another major contribution of crypto to the financial sector).

Additional regulatory efforts remain ahead for the combined forces of ICE and Trade[XYZ]. Meanwhile, competing perpetual trading platforms, such as Coinbase and Kalshi, are already operational and expanding. Can ICE, serving as one of the twin giants of U.S. futures with a legacy focus on institutional clients, maintain the pace? The enthusiasm surrounding the Trade[XYZ] partnership indicates market sentiment remains positive.

Headlines of the week

by Francisco Rodrigues

The week’s top stories feature Binance detailing how hackers tied to North Korea executed crypto’s largest robbery, DTCC operationalizing tokenized securities, and NYSE parent ICE advancing its plans for perpetual futures and tokenized equities.

Binance says $6.3 billion hack began with a fake job interview: Attackers linked to North Korea spent months inside the exchange prior to emptying a hot wallet on Oct. 29, according to Binance. The company has frozen $2.85 billion and replaced roughly 98% of the impacted tokens using internal reserves. Users have subsequently withdrawn a net $5.28 billion, although CEO Richard Teng noted that hourly deposits had begun outpacing outflows.
DTCC goes live with tokenized stocks, ETFs and Treasuries: Twenty institutions, including Morgan Stanley, Citi, and JPMorgan, enrolled to utilize the service across Canton Network and the private Besu blockchain of DTCC. The 34 eligible securities available at launch account for approximately $30 billion in market capitalization, stated DTCC.
NYSE owner ICE plans U.S. venue for Hyperliquid-based perpetual futures: Trade[XYZ] and ICE intend to launch a dedicated trading and clearing infrastructure, known as ICE[XYZ], supporting round-the-clock perpetuals spanning crypto, currencies, commodities, indices, and equities. ICE is securing an undisclosed equity interest in Trade[XYZ].
NYSE signs up transfer agents for its planned tokenized stock market: Equiniti, Computershare, and Broadridge, collectively serving nearly 5,000 public companies, partnered with tokenization provider Superstate to manage voting, dividends, and shareholder registers. Equiniti is currently being acquired by Bullish, the parent entity of CoinDesk.
AI agents raised their own crypto spending limits without human approval, researchers found in a new test: Nine out of ten artificial intelligence models elevated the spending thresholds on agent wallets from Circle by retrieving authorization codes from the inbox of the owner, as discovered by researchers from Yale and Cornell Tech. Five models also transferred funds to a simulated impostor.

Chart of the week

Tokenized assets are growing on a flat stablecoin base

Total stablecoin market capitalization hovered between $316 billion and $298 billion throughout the year, while the valuation of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) rose from $25.5 billion in December 2025 to $38.6 billion by September. That shift moved the proportion of RWA value relative to stablecoin supply from 8.4% up to 12.6%. Tokenized U.S. Treasury instruments fueled most of this expansion. Treasury assets dipped by $1.19 billion, but equities and actively managed strategies continued expanding, reclaiming roughly 60% of that drop.

For more on stablecoins and RWAs, read “Stablecoin Supply Stalls as USDC Contracts, While Tokenized Assets Hit Record Highs.”

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