Musings on Blockchain from the Investor Trenches
The owner of the NYSE is building on Hyperliquid
ICE will bring Hyperliquid-based perpetual futures to US customers. Five months ago it was reportedly warning regulators about them.
This week ICE, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, agreed to take a minority stake in Trade[XYZ] and run its US markets. That means a regulated venue for perpetual futures on stocks, indices, commodities, currencies and crypto, with the trading itself running on Hyperliquid. ICE brings what an offshore startup lacks: a US-regulated exchange and clearing operation, identity checks and access to US customers. CFTC approval is still pending.
Stan Druckenmiller, also an investor, made a rare post on X: "I am excited to be an investor in trade(xyz) as they partner with ICE to bring 24/7 perpetual futures on Hyperliquid to the United States. As a market participant, I am looking forward to using their innovative product to enhance my investment process."
Perpetual futures are among the most widely used products blockchain markets have produced. They work like futures, but they never expire, and they trade around the clock every day of the year. Hyperliquid is the leading onchain venue for them. It earns about $670m a year at its current run rate, and roughly 99% of the trading fees it generates are used to buy back its HYPE token. Few examples show more clearly how value flows to a blockchain protocol.
Its prices now matter outside of crypto. When war in the Middle East moved oil on a Friday evening in March, traders priced it over the weekend on Hyperliquid while CME, NYMEX and ICE were shut. When Cerebras went public in May, its bankers priced the IPO at $185. In the hour before trading began, it was changing hands at about $355 on Hyperliquid. It opened on Nasdaq at $350.
Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework lets outside teams launch their own markets on its infrastructure, as we explained in January. Trade[XYZ] is the most successful so far. Its contracts on oil, gold, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500, among others, have traded over $650bn in just over a year. That is the business ICE is buying into.
In May, Bloomberg reported that ICE and CME had warned the CFTC and Congress that anonymous trading on Hyperliquid could be used to move oil benchmarks and evade sanctions. Twelve days later ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher told a conference "I love these guys", denied the lobbying, and described his question to regulators as "Can we do that?" His complaint was that ICE could not offer the product itself.
Later that month the CFTC approved Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual future. That showed these contracts could sit on a registered US exchange with a registered clearing house, licenses ICE already holds. What ICE did not have was the product and the traders, and Trade[XYZ] had both. So ICE bought into Trade[XYZ] instead of building its own, as it did with Polymarket last year.
At Legends4Legends, our Managing Partner and CIO Ruud Smets called Robinhood Chain the blueprint for how incumbents will adopt this technology, with the regulated brand in front and open protocols behind. ICE is the largest exchange operator yet to follow it.
This week’s market
BGCI Index
-7.38%
Bitcoin
-6.22%
Ethereum
-8.05%
Solana
-9.62%
All figures are week-to-date as of 30 October, 14:45 CET
From Theta Insights
•Talks and panels from Legends4Legends 2026, from regulation and tokenization to AI and onchain finance (watch the talks)•Blockchain’s moment for serious capital: for the first time adoption is running ahead of capital (read here)
Blockchain news
•NYSE owner ICE teams with Trade[XYZ] to bring Hyperliquid-based perpetual futures to U.S. (learn more)•DTCC‘s Tokenization Service Goes Live With 34 Securities (learn more)•Ripple Wins Final OCC Approval for Trust Bank (learn more)•Janus Henderson Launches Onchain Nasdaq-100 Fund (learn more)•Robinhood‘s prediction markets out-earn its crypto business in Q3 (learn more)•Binance loses over $6 billion in ‘biggest crypto hack in history’ (learn more)•Google moves into crypto custody, previewing a service for banks to secure digital assets (learn more)•Hong Kong’s Biggest Bank Puts a Stablecoin in 3 Million Wallets (learn more)
Relevant financial updates
•Kalshi*, a leading prediction market, has raised $1bln in a funding round co-led by Sequoia and Wellington with investments from 2 others at a $40bln valuation•Pearl Research Labs*, an AI compute and mining project, has raised $130mln in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with investments from Ribbit Capital•PhotonPay, a cross-border payments platform, has raised $40mln in a Series C round led by Blockchain Capital with investments from 4 others•Luxor Technology*, an end-to-end provider of compute services, has received a $16mln strategic investment from CMT Digital with investments from 5 others•Predicate*, a compliance infrastructure provider for stablecoins and tokenized assets, has raised $8mln in a Series A round led by Blockchain Capital with investments from 7 others•Cancore, a liquidity platform for tokenized finance on Canton Network, has raised $7.2mln in a Seed round led by MH Ventures with investments from 5 others at a $60mln valuation•Mochatrade*, a US stock perpetuals platform for India, has raised $6mln in a Seed round led by Coinbase Ventures with investments from 4 others
*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 30/10
Interesting things to read and listen to
•‘Why open AI markets are starting to look like crypto, and why Robot Ventures led Nous Research’s $90mln round’, by Tarun Chitra, managing partner at our manager Robot Ventures, on the Delphi Podcast (listen here)
“If we as a fund have a helicopter view, then Theta has a satellite view because they basically get the best intel”
Lasse Clausen, Founding Partner, 1kx
Best wishes,
John
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