The boom in leveraged ETFs, heavily concentrated in tech and crypto, forces systematic buying on up days and selling on down days to maintain leverage targets. This creates a "negative gamma" effect that structurally amplifies momentum in both directions and contributes to market fragility.

The 24/7 nature of perpetual futures (“perps”) is attractive to traditional markets for assets like the S&P 500. This shift requires 24/7 settlement infrastructure, making stablecoins essential collateral and creating a massive, non-speculative demand driver for them.

Bitcoin's recent crash is attributed to extreme leverage unique to crypto, with platforms letting users buy $100 of Bitcoin with only $1 of their own money. This amplifies gains, creating bubbles, but more dangerously, it amplifies losses, forcing panic selling and cascading liquidations that can erase huge gains almost instantly.

Sophisticated perpetual DEXs allow speculators to take highly leveraged positions on blue-chip assets, offering the asymmetric upside they seek without the informational disadvantages and risks of the meme coin 'swamp.' This product refinement is changing the landscape of on-chain speculation.

Traditional prime brokerage works because it can cross-margin diverse assets that don't all crash simultaneously. Crypto markets lack this feature, as assets show extreme correlation during crises, moving spectacularly in unison. This makes traditional risk models ineffective and derivatives inherently riskier.

The current crypto environment mirrors the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. 'Good money is chasing after many intrinsically weak assets,' which are then complexly leveraged and integrated into the balance sheets of systemically important institutions, creating a growing, underappreciated systemic risk.

Thinking about leverage as simply "on" or "off" is limiting. A more advanced approach views any asset with a lower expected return as a potential liability. One can effectively "borrow" it (i.e., short it) to finance the purchase of an asset with a higher expected return, aiming to capture the spread.

Rapid, massive price swings in crypto are often caused by the liquidation of highly leveraged perpetual futures ("perps"). When many leveraged short positions are wiped out, it forces a cascade of buying that creates an artificial price spike, a dynamic less about market belief and more about financial mechanics.

Creating synthetic derivatives (like perpetual futures) of traditional assets on-chain is more scalable and efficient than creating direct tokenized copies. This is especially true for assets with high derivative demand, such as emerging market equities.