Open interest in perpetual contracts tied to stocks, metals and oil has doubled since late May as major crypto exchanges expand beyond digital assets, CryptoQuant reported.

TradFi perpetual open interest climbs above $2B

TradFi perpetual contracts have become one of the fastest-growing areas of the crypto exchange market, according to CryptoQuant’s report.

The products give traders continuous exposure to traditional assets, including metals, crude oil and equities. Unlike standard futures, perpetual contracts do not have a fixed expiry date and use regular funding payments to keep their prices close to the underlying market.

Open interest in these products remained between roughly $350 million and $500 million during spring 2026. It then rose sharply from late May, crossing $2 billion by July.

The increase allows crypto exchanges to compete more directly with traditional trading platforms. Crypto venues can offer the contracts around the clock, including during hours when conventional stock and commodity markets are closed.

Despite the rapid growth, TradFi perpetuals remain small compared with crypto derivatives. CryptoQuant estimated that the segment represents only around 3% of the roughly $65 billion held in cryptocurrency perpetual contracts.

Binance extends its derivatives lead into TradFi

Binance holds the largest share of open interest in both categories, showing how established crypto exchanges are using their liquidity and trading infrastructure to enter traditional asset markets.

CryptoQuant’s headline snapshot placed Binance’s TradFi perpetual open interest at around $720 million, equal to roughly 35% of the market. Bybit and Gate followed with about $381 million each.

Together, the three exchanges accounted for around 70% of TradFi perpetual open interest. Adding OKX and Bitget brought the top five’s share to approximately 93%, leaving the remaining capital spread across smaller venues.

The concentration mirrors the structure of the crypto perpetual market. Binance held about $22.86 billion, or 35%, of crypto perpetual open interest in the report’s main snapshot. Bybit followed with $9.67 billion, while Gate held $8.61 billion.

Those three platforms controlled approximately 63% of crypto perpetual open interest. The five largest exchanges, including Bitget and OKX, accounted for about 81%.

Crypto perpetuals remain below previous peaks

Aggregate crypto perpetual open interest has expanded five to six times since early 2023, when it stood near $12 billion to $15 billion.

Capital in outstanding contracts reached about $80 billion in September 2025 and returned to a similar level in early 2026. It has since fallen by roughly 20% to around $65 billion.

CryptoQuant interpreted the decline as evidence of deleveraging or capital withdrawals rather than fresh money entering the crypto derivatives market. The fall contrasts with the growth in products tracking traditional assets.

However, the $2 billion TradFi segment is not yet large enough to offset changes in the broader crypto perpetual market. Its expansion instead shows exchanges adding new markets while retaining the same concentration of capital among the largest operators.

US perpetual futures market follows a regulated path

US investors are gaining access to similar products, but domestic contracts operate under a different regulatory structure.

Coinbase Financial Markets offers US customers CFTC-regulated perpetual-style futures that trade nearly around the clock. Unlike offshore perpetuals with no expiry, Coinbase’s contracts have five-year terms and use funding payments to stay aligned with spot prices.

The US market is also moving toward true perpetual contracts. In May, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved Kalshi’s cash-settled Bitcoin perpetual futures contract, which has no fixed expiration date and trades continuously. The regulator said its assessment applies on a contract-by-contract basis and does not automatically cover perpetuals tied to non-crypto assets.

CryptoQuant’s findings suggest that demand for continuous trading is spreading beyond cryptocurrencies. Whether TradFi perpetuals become a larger source of exchange capital will depend on liquidity growth, regulatory access, and whether traders continue moving activity from conventional venues.

Regional mediators are reportedly close to a proposal that could restart the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, although Tehran continues to deny seeking renewed talks with Washington.

Mediators push US-Iran MoU revival

Pakistan, Egypt and Qatar have stepped up efforts to revive the US-Iran framework signed last month, according to two sources cited by The Times of Israel.

The mediators have developed a proposal aimed at resolving conflicting interpretations of how the MoU applies to the Strait of Hormuz. Iran argues that the agreement gives it some authority over operations in the waterway, while Washington maintains that it does not.

Iran and Oman have reportedly approved the mediators’ proposal. A final decision now rests with US President Donald Trump, according to the report. The White House had delayed its response until after Trump met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington.

Reaching an agreement would allow the US and Iran to restart negotiations before the MoU’s 60-day window expires next month. However, neither Washington nor Tehran has publicly confirmed that a new round of talks has been scheduled.

Strait of Hormuz remains the main dispute

Tehran has offered Oman a temporary system under which one direction of maritime traffic would pass through Iranian waters, with part of the opposite route also placed under Iranian control.

Iran rejected an Omani proposal to divide the shipping routes equally between the two countries. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi argued that the plan did not address Iran’s security concerns, according to Reuters.

Gharibabadi said the strait would remain closed if Oman rejected Tehran’s alternative. He also warned that Iran would not allow a third country to clear mines from the waterway, even if Oman invited it to participate.

At the same time, the Iranian official rejected reports that Tehran had approached Washington.

“Iran has not made any requests for negotiations or ceasefire with the US in the past 17 days,” Gharibabadi said.

He claimed that Washington had instead sought dialogue through Oman and offered assurances that the US would not take further military action. The US has not publicly confirmed those claims.

Oil drops as markets price in lower conflict risk

Crude prices fell sharply as the pause in US-Iran attacks raised hopes that diplomacy could resume, even without confirmation of a breakthrough.

Brent crude futures dropped 4.8% to settle at $84.09 per barrel on Tuesday, while US West Texas Intermediate declined 4.1% to $79.26. Both benchmarks reached their lowest levels in about two weeks.

Brent has now fallen about 16% over three sessions. However, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains limited, leaving energy markets exposed to another increase in tensions.

For US consumers and investors, a lasting agreement and fuller reopening of the strait could reduce pressure on fuel costs and inflation. That effect remains uncertain while the maritime dispute and the broader conflict remain unresolved.

What comes next for US-Iran talks

Trump and Netanyahu discussed Iran during their White House meeting, which the US administration described as “positive and productive.”

Netanyahu later said the two leaders shared the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. However, neither side announced whether Trump had approved the mediators’ proposal following the meeting.

The next signal will likely come from Washington, Oman, or the three regional mediators. Until then, reports of progress remain at odds with Tehran’s public denial that formal US-Iran negotiations are underway.

AmericanFortress, a blockchain security company, has proposed a cryptographic approach aimed at making today’s cryptocurrency wallets more resilient to potential future quantum attacks—without asking users to move funds, rotate keys, or change their wallet addresses.

In a technical paper posted to the Cryptography ePrint Archive, the company describes how it would add post-quantum protections while keeping wallet address formats intact. The work is positioned as compatible with seed-based hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets commonly used across networks that rely on elliptic-curve cryptography.

Key takeaways

• AmericanFortress says its scheme can preserve existing wallet addresses while layering post-quantum verification into the system.
• The approach leverages zero-knowledge proofs derived from a wallet’s seed phrase, rather than replacing the underlying elliptic-curve cryptography.
• The paper is published on ePrint and has not been peer-reviewed.
• Other teams are pursuing different post-quantum paths, including hardware-based quantum-resistant signing for EVM wallets.

Preserving wallet addresses while adding post-quantum safeguards

AmericanFortress’s proposal is laid out in a paper available on the Cryptography ePrint Archive (https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1508). The company frames its central goal as reducing the friction of post-quantum migration: if quantum-capable attackers ever become capable of breaking elliptic-curve cryptography, wallets would ideally upgrade their security properties without forcing users to transfer funds to new addresses.

According to the paper, the scheme is designed to fit seed-based HD wallet constructions—structures that generate many addresses and keys from a single seed phrase. AmericanFortress says the mechanism is compatible with wallets used across ecosystems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, alongside other networks that depend on elliptic-curve cryptography.

The proposal does not rely on discarding the existing elliptic-curve-based key material. Instead, it introduces an additional verification layer: nodes would validate zero-knowledge proofs built from the wallet’s original seed phrase. Meanwhile, users would continue signing transactions using their current keys.

That distinction matters for practicality. Most post-quantum strategies require some form of migration—new address types, new key formats, or user actions that can be costly, operationally risky, or confusing at scale. AmericanFortress’s approach aims to shift the burden toward network-side verification rather than user-side replacement.

Why the focus on quantum readiness is accelerating

AmericanFortress’s paper ties its motivation to widely discussed concerns about cryptographic longevity. While quantum computers capable of breaking elliptic-curve cryptography do not exist today, researchers generally agree that sufficiently powerful systems could eventually render current elliptic-curve protections unreliable.

The company also cites an analysis from Bloomberg estimating that up to $470 billion in Bitcoin could be at risk in a scenario where sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available. Although such estimates depend on assumptions about adversarial capability and timeline, they underscore why the industry is working on “future-proofing” now rather than waiting for an end-game scenario to arrive.

In the meantime, multiple blockchain and research efforts have begun mapping migration routes. The paper situates AmericanFortress’s proposal alongside those broader efforts by aiming to minimize disruptions for end users—an especially sensitive constraint for wallet designs that must handle large volumes of legacy addresses and long-lived funds.

Hardware and account-level upgrades pursue other routes

AmericanFortress is not the only participant in the post-quantum wallet security race. On Tuesday, Freedom Factory introduced PQ1, which it describes as a post-quantum hardware wallet for Ethereum and other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks.

Where AmericanFortress’s approach is software-based and seeks compatibility with existing wallet address structures, PQ1 relies on post-quantum cryptographic signatures produced within dedicated hardware. Freedom Factory says the wallet uses SPHINCS+C10 signatures and is designed to secure transactions via ERC-4337 smart accounts.

The difference highlights a fundamental tension in post-quantum planning: some strategies aim to retrofit protection into the present without changing addresses, while others focus on moving security to new cryptographic primitives—often with hardware or account-system changes to manage complexity. For users, these distinctions can determine whether upgrades feel like an update or like a migration.

What broader initiatives suggest about the next migration steps

Industry momentum toward quantum resistance is visible across multiple ecosystems. In recent months, a Strategy-led consortium pledged $15 million to fund Bitcoin quantum security research. Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation published a proposal outlining a path for migrating accounts to quantum-resistant cryptography. Separately, Algorand has stated plans to introduce quantum-resistant accounts by 2027.

Taken together, these efforts suggest that different networks are converging on the same problem—protecting cryptographic guarantees in a post-quantum world—but not converging on a single technical method. Some will emphasize protocol-level migration, others will rely on account abstraction, and others will attempt compatibility layers that reduce changes for users.

For readers tracking practical progress, the key question is how proposals like AmericanFortress’s would be integrated at the network level: whether nodes can verify the required zero-knowledge proofs efficiently, how the scheme would be standardized, and what changes would be needed for wallet software and transaction formats to support broader adoption.

As post-quantum work shifts from theory to implementations, watch for how (and how quickly) cryptographic proposals move from ePrint into peer review, prototype testing, and—crucially—real protocol or client integrations. Even if quantum threats remain hypothetical in the near term, the winners will likely be the approaches that minimize operational disruption while remaining verifiable at scale.

Michael Saylor has warned that changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules pose a greater long-term threat than rival cryptocurrencies, governments, or external competition.

Saylor warns against capturing Bitcoin consensus

Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor issued the warning in a series of X posts on Tuesday, describing Bitcoin’s consensus rules as its constitution. Those rules determine how ownership is recognized, how scarcity is maintained, how transactions settle, and what network participants can change.

“Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory,” Saylor wrote. “Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within.”

He argued that changing the protocol to serve one group would infringe on the economic rights of miners, developers, investors, companies, custodians, and other users. Once one faction gains enough influence to rewrite the rules, he warned, competing groups may pursue changes through the same process.

That outcome could make protocol disputes permanent, according to Saylor. He said prolonged governance conflicts would drive away capital, slow development, weaken security, and leave Bitcoin with only a fraction of its potential.

Saylor expects Bitcoin could grow 100-fold and become part of the infrastructure supporting global capital markets. From that perspective, he argued that a poorly designed rule introduced today could restrict financial products, technologies, and economic activity that do not yet exist.

Why Saylor opposes BIP-110

Saylor’s latest comments extend his opposition to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, a proposed temporary soft fork intended to reduce arbitrary data stored on the blockchain.

BIP-110 supporters argue that limiting some forms of data would ease storage and verification burdens for node operators. They also want Bitcoin to remain focused on monetary transactions rather than inscriptions, tokens, or file storage.

Saylor accepts that some on-chain data may have little value or could be linked to harmful activity. However, he argues that Bitcoin cannot reliably determine the purpose behind transaction data and should not use consensus rules to decide which valid, fee-paying transactions deserve block space.

“Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity,” Saylor wrote in his July 18 article. “It needs guardians of neutrality.”

His latest X thread widened that argument beyond BIP-110. Saylor also criticized proposals that add covenant functionality or increase block capacity, saying each approach creates different risks for Bitcoin’s base layer.

Bitcoin fee market and network security at stake

According to Saylor, restrictions on valid transactions could reduce competition for block space and weaken the fee market. Larger blocks, meanwhile, could dilute block-space scarcity while raising the bandwidth and hardware costs required to operate a node.

He also argued that covenants would make Bitcoin’s consensus rules more complex and introduce additional attack surfaces. These claims represent Saylor’s assessment of the proposals rather than an established consensus among Bitcoin developers.

Transaction fees will become increasingly important to miners as the block subsidy falls by half roughly every 210,000 blocks. Saylor warned that suppressing fee demand could reduce the income available to miners and weaken the financial incentives protecting the network.

His preferred approach is to keep the base layer simple, neutral, scarce, and secure. Developers can then build new functions through second-layer networks and applications, where adoption remains voluntary and failures have a more limited effect.

Strategy backs $15 million security effort

Saylor’s stance carries added relevance for US investors because Strategy has built its corporate model around holding Bitcoin and promoting enterprise adoption. He recently argued that companies are necessary for Bitcoin to develop into a global monetary network, placing corporate participation at the center of its next stage.

Strategy also joined Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Galaxy in forming the Bitcoin Security Consortium.

The nine firms pledged a combined $15 million over three years to support developers and researchers working on Bitcoin security, including preparations for potential quantum-computing threats. Members will direct their funding independently, while the consortium says it will neither control Bitcoin development nor take positions on individual protocol changes.

Saylor said upgrades should remain rare, conservative, and driven by necessity. His latest intervention places protocol restraint alongside corporate adoption and security funding as central parts of his long-term Bitcoin strategy.