GM. This is Milk Road, smoother than finally nailing a trade you didnโt immediately regret.
The global derivatives market does $8T in volume every single day.
Not per year. Per day.
Bigger than equities. Bigger than bonds. The kind of number that makes everything else feel small.
Perp DEXs, decentralized platforms that let anyone trade leveraged derivatives without a broker or clearinghouse, currently capture about $20B of that.
$20B out of $8T.
That gap is the trade.
And there's a specific reason why right now is the moment to make it. Actually, three reasons.
๐ They're structural, they're compounding, and once you see them, you can't unsee them.
- The first one is about who's buying.
- The second is about the economics of the platforms built to serve them.
- The third is about why the obvious competition can't actually compete.
Together, they point to a window.
๐ฅ One that exists right now, before the valuation gap closes, before the next leg of retail adoption makes today's entry points look obvious in hindsight.
In this report, we cover:
- How big this market gets, and what 1% penetration means in revenue.
- The retail supercycle and why it isn't slowing down.
- Three structural reasons perp DEXs keep winning.
- Why CEXs are losing ground and can't close the gap.
- The main players and how to value them.
- How I'm sizing my positions and what I'm watching.
Letโs get right into it.
The opportunity
The entire perp DEX sector is worth around $40B today.
It does about $20B in daily trading volume.
But the total addressable market is $8T. Every day.
That's not a rounding error.
Perp DEXs are capturing roughly 0.25% of the market they're competing in.
Think about what closing even a fraction of that gap actually means.
At 1% market share, $80B flows through perp DEXs every single day.
๐ At current fee structures, that's somewhere between $3 and $7B in annual protocol revenue across the whole category.
At 2% to 4%, you're talking tens of billions.
For context: the entire U.S. options market represents roughly 15% of global derivatives activity.
Retail investors helped push it to record volumes in 2025.
Perp DEXs don't need to replicate that. They don't need to win everything. They just need to keep taking share from a market that dwarfs anything else in finance.
The evidence says the derivatives boom is already happening.
The retail supercycle
Retail traders already love these products.
๐ Across every leveraged product category, options, futures, CFDs, and crypto, demand has been breaking records.
Not during a single bull run.
Consistently, through volatile markets and sideways stretches alike.
What the data from the last 18 months shows is not a cycle.
๐ It's a structural shift in how retail participates in markets.
And perps sit at the exact intersection of everything that shift is pointing toward.
Start with options, the most visible signal...
- U.S.-listed options hit 15.2B contracts in 2025, up 26% from the previous all-time high.
- Average daily volume climbed to 61M contracts.
- For the first time, retail broker flows accounted for nearly half of that entire market.
- The products driving it were the simplest, shortest-dated ones: zero-day-to-expiry contracts made up roughly 76% of volume.
Retail wasn't reaching for complexity. It was reaching for speed and leverage with as little friction as possible.
Or we can just look at Robinhood numbers.
Options contracts are up and right only. What bear market?
The same pattern showed up in the futures market.
- CME Group, the world's largest derivatives exchange, posted a record 28.1M contracts in average daily volume in 2025, up 6% year over year.
Thatโs not the eye-catching fact, but the comment that followed certainly is.
- Retail was explicitly called out as the exchange's fastest-growing client segment, fueling explosive growth in micro contracts and crypto futures.
CME then also partnered with Robinhood to reach more retail traders directly.
๐ When the world's largest derivatives exchange starts building infrastructure around a specific type of customer, that customer is no longer a footnote.
And then there's CFDs:
- In Q4 2025 alone, five major retail brokers each crossed $1T in monthly CFD volume, combining for a record $7.4T in a single quarter.
- Active CFD accounts globally surged 14.6% in that same quarter to 6.79M users.
- Early 2026 projections already point to monthly industry volumes topping $37T, another 25% jump from prior peaks.
Already sold on the retail supercycle thesis?
Good. Because crypto perpetuals make everything above look modest.
Crypto perpetuals tell the most extreme version of this story...
- Total crypto derivatives volume ran between $86T and $93T last year.
- Perps accounted for 75% to 77% of all of it.
- Onchain perp DEX volume alone exploded more than 300% year over year, with multiple months topping $1T in notional turnover, even during periods of flat or choppy price action.
What makes all of this meaningful is not any single number.
It's the consistency across every product category.
Options, futures, CFDs, crypto perps: retail demand for leveraged exposure grew everywhere, at the same time, through volatile markets and sideways stretches alike.
These records weren't set during a bull market euphoria. They held through uncertainty.
Retail traders have figured out that leverage, used on the right product, is not a gambling tool. It's a capital efficiency tool. In theory, at least. ๐คฃ
And once people figure that out, they don't go back.
The question is not whether this demand exists. It clearly does.
It's how fast, and who captures it when it does.
Uh, Ohโฆ ๐ง The rest of this report is exclusive to PRO members!
Already a PRO member? Log in here.
WHATโS LEFT INSIDE? ๐
- Why you should be bullish.
- The real edge DEX has over CEX.
- The players worth watching.
- How I'm betting on this.
Upgrade your subscription today to unlock access to all of the milky insights above, PLUS:
- Weekly reports to help you manage investments, allocate capital, take profits, and stay ahead in crypto. ๐
- Access to the PRO Community, where the Milk Road crew & 1000s of fellow PROs talk crypto. Donโt miss the monthly live events! ๐ซ
Already a PRO member? Log in here.
