From Disruptor to Shadow Market: The Crypto Market is Becoming a Colony of Traditional Finance

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Recently, Moomoo, a subsidiary of Futu, officially integrated Hyperliquid's on-chain US stock perpetual contract market data into its App, allowing nearly 30 million users worldwide to view real-time pricing of on-chain derivatives directly on the traditional brokerage interface.

Prior to this, platforms like trade.xyz had already conducted pre-IPO perpetual contract pricing and trading for new stocks such as Cerebras and SpaceX.

Discussions around "crypto-stock linkage" have been ongoing for several years, initially describing the simultaneous rise and fall of BTC and the Nasdaq, later extending to mining stocks and treasury companies fluctuating with cryptocurrency prices.

This article argues that "crypto-stock linkage" has evolved through three stages: macro correlation (1.0), one-way penetration of sentiment and funds (2.0), and a new stage where on-chain perpetual contracts provide all-day sentiment signals for traditional assets through 24/7 continuous trading (3.0).

Image Source: AI Generated

1.0: Passive Following of Macro Correlation

Before 2020, the correlation between BTC and the Nasdaq was generally low, often remaining in a low correlation or even slightly negative correlation range, with both markets essentially moving independently.

After the pandemic shock, the situation changed significantly. CryptoQuant data shows that from 2020 to 2022, the 30-day rolling correlation coefficient between BTC and the Nasdaq repeatedly broke through the high level of 70%.

During this period, global central banks engaged in massive monetary easing, with the same batch of risk-seeking funds flooding into both tech stocks and the crypto market, sharing the liquidity expectations of this macro denominator.

In 2022, the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest rate hikes put pressure on risk assets, causing BTC and the Nasdaq to once again decline sharply in sync.

After 2022, the correlation has somewhat receded, but the trend is not unidirectional. In January 2025, macro sentiment resonated again around Trump's inauguration, with the 30-day correlation coefficient rising back to 0.70, reaching a two-year high.

Subsequently, as the intensity of events waned, the correlation once again disintegrated. By June 2026, this figure had fallen back to about -8.86%, essentially in a zero correlation range.

This process of change indicates that the correlation between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq is not fixed but adjusts with changes in the macro environment and market structure.

2.0: One-Way Penetration of Sentiment and Funds

As the scale of the crypto market continues to expand, the relationship between the two markets began to undergo new changes. The sentiment and funds in the crypto market no longer merely passively follow US stocks but began to unidirectionally influence certain sectors of US stocks.

An increasing number of retail investors are active in both markets, with resonances between hot topics becoming more frequent. The crypto-stock linkage has entered version 2.0.

Mining stocks are the most typical example. Companies like Marathon and Riot see their stock prices highly synchronized with BTC prices, underpinned by direct business linkages. When BTC rises, mining revenue expectations increase, leading to a rise in stock prices, and vice versa. This linkage does not rely on sentiment transmission but is a hard connection at the fundamental level.

Treasury companies represent another path. In 2024, MicroStrategy's stock price rose sharply, and the market's pricing logic for its "BTC leveraged exposure" was gradually accepted by more capital. After the model spread, more traditional listed companies actively introduced crypto assets into their balance sheets. Bitmine is one of the most aggressive treasury companies, having heavily bought ETH in 2025, and is still down about 50%, with the ups and downs of the crypto market directly affecting the asset valuation and stock price direction of such companies.

It is noteworthy that the stock price fluctuations of treasury companies often precede those of the cryptocurrencies themselves. The market's speculation on their holding sizes and financing expectations sometimes drives stock prices to react before crypto prices have even started to move. This introduces a certain complexity in the direction of the linkage in version 2.0.

However, overall, the linkage remains one-way. Funds and sentiment flow from the crypto market to US stock concept sectors, without forming a stable two-way loop. During US stock market closures, there remains an information gap between the two markets, which is a structural gap that version 2.0 has yet to resolve.

3.0: Extended Trading Hours and the Value of Sentiment Signals

Filling the Trading Time Vacuum

The traditional stock market has fixed trading hour limitations, with weak liquidity before and after hours, and a complete halt on weekends. On-chain perpetual contracts break this limitation, allowing market sentiment to receive more continuous feedback through 24-hour trading.

On June 9, before the US stock market opened, the perpetual contract for Micron (MU) on trade.xyz had already reflected the upward trend of the day, with prices breaking through $999.4, approaching the $1000 mark, and a 24-hour trading volume reaching $243 million.

During the suspension of the South Korean stock market, trade.xyz and Binance provided continuous quotes for SK Hynix, with total positions exceeding $170 million across the two platforms.

From the perspective of Hyperliquid's HIP-3 ecosystem, the cumulative trading volume of stock-linked perpetual contracts has exceeded $18.8 billion, surpassing the combined total of $7.66 billion for crude oil and Brent crude oil perpetual contracts.

This continuous pricing capability is precisely why Moomoo is willing to integrate Hyperliquid's market data. As trading volumes on related platforms grow, on-chain stock perpetual contracts are becoming an important window for observing asset sentiment.

According to the Moomoo interface, its oracle price is derived from a weighted combination of multiple external price sources, serving as a reference price for the underlying asset to anchor the mark price, aiming to avoid disturbances from abnormal quotes in a single market.

Products like perpetual contracts were regarded as pseudo-demand tracks four years ago. Crypto KOL qinbafrank believes that individual US stocks lack futures tools, and the role of on-chain perpetual contracts for such assets is similar to the linkage between altcoins' spot and contract markets, providing considerable operational space for certain capital.

The Special Significance of Pre-IPO

For Pre-IPO assets, the significance of on-chain perpetual contracts is even more pronounced. In the traditional IPO process, ordinary investors find it difficult to participate in pricing in advance, while on-chain perpetual contracts make this process continuous.

In May 2026, Cerebras Systems listed on Nasdaq, and the Pre-IPO perpetual contracts on trade.xyz had been trading for several weeks in advance. Before the opening, the on-chain contract quickly surged from the $290 range to $380, with a single-hour trading volume approaching $100 million, while Nasdaq was still in the pricing phase, with ordinary investors only able to participate officially at 1 AM.

The situation with SpaceX is similarly representative. In the three weeks leading up to the IPO, the average daily trading volume of the xyz:SPCX contract on Hyperliquid was only about $26 million. After SpaceX officially listed on Nasdaq last Friday, the trading volume for xyz:SPCX surged to $1.4 billion that day, accounting for 30% of the total trading volume on the platform's HIP-3. Similar contracts on Binance also saw rapid volume growth, with the 24-hour trading volume of SPCXUSDT exceeding $5.6 billion by June 13, becoming the second-largest trading product on the platform, second only to BTC perpetual contracts.

Real-World Boundaries and Mechanism Weaknesses

However, limitations in scale and mechanisms also exist.

On one hand, the data growth on on-chain platforms is still concentrated on a few targets, and the overall scale remains small compared to traditional markets.

According to Hyperinsight monitoring, the total weekly trading volume on trade.xyz is about $15 billion, equivalent to approximately 0.201% of the overall traditional market. Specifically, the on-chain corresponding contract trading volumes for MU and Marvell account for about 0.39% and 0.75% of the real stock trading in the global traditional securities market, respectively, making it difficult for on-chain perpetual contracts to form a substantial pricing impact.

On the other hand, the Pre-IPO track also has certain vulnerabilities at the mechanism level. The SpaceX Pre-IPO contract was once subject to pricing adjustments due to updates in equity data, forcing multiple platforms to temporarily delist and reprice. The SpaceX IPO on Kraken's xStocks platform also saw allocations far below expectations, with some users receiving actual allocations equivalent to only about $600 and receiving refund notices.

This process shows that while on-chain perpetual contracts provide continuous pricing, their issuance and distribution phases are still constrained by the supply limitations of the traditional underwriting system.

Overall, what on-chain perpetual contracts can currently achieve is to provide sentiment extension and signal supplementation during non-trading hours for traditional assets. They have not yet changed the underlying pricing logic but have already demonstrated actual value in specific assets and scenarios.

Conclusion

Crypto-stock linkage has reached the 3.0 stage, where the core focus is no longer on the strength of macro correlation but rather on how on-chain perpetual contracts provide a continuous sentiment observation dimension that has long been lacking in traditional markets.

Pre-market, after-hours, weekend suspensions, and blank periods for new stock pricing—these information vacuums are being filled by the uninterrupted on-chain pricing available 24/7.

Although the current on-chain trading volume is still far smaller than that of traditional markets and cannot yet be considered a competitor for pricing power, it has already become another observation window beyond traditional asset prices.

In areas like Pre-IPO, where traditional pricing mechanisms are inherently weak, on-chain perpetual contracts have begun to play a real role in price discovery and sentiment transmission, which is the clearest practical scenario of the 3.0 stage so far.

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