The below is a repost from the Blind Spot’s pop-up venture, The Peg, which was first published on December 11, 2025.
In September 2015, wedged into the back of a Shanghai taxi, a young mathematician and his co-founder began to sketch out a strange, expiry-less futures contract to solve a nagging problem on their crypto exchange.
That invention was the perpetual future and has since grown into crypto’s dominant derivative, despite remaining mostly unheard of in traditional financial circles.
In recent weeks, a few observers have begun to notice that the instrument is gaining influence over the evolution of the modern financial system. But the commentary remains narrow and dismissive. Significantly, it fails to frame the tool in the context of three other major structural shifts: the return of scarce-reserve operating regimes in central banking, the demise of unsecured funding as an emergency source of liquidity, and the growing cost of funding the international dollar payments float.