Beyond Expiry: The Operating Model for Perpetual Futures

Perpetual futures have quickly moved from an offshore and mostly off-limits instrument to an in-scope opportunity for US-based asset managers. Perpetuals (perps) give desks a position they can hold indefinitely while creating an ongoing operational obligation for the middle and back office. Those traits are inherent to the liquidity perps offer compared to traditional futures.

The liquidity comes from continuous exposure to the price of an underlying asset with no expiry to manage and no delivery to take. The trader keeps the position open, with the ability to add to or trim it throughout the day. Because the exposure concentrates in a single standing contract rather than a strip of expiries, liquidity sits on a single line rather than having to work a ladder of contracts.

Crypto perpetuals volume climbed to a daily peak of nearly $750 billion between April 2025 and April 2026.ⁱ Perps also now include tokenized equities, commodities, FX, and other real-world assets.

Regulatory change will likely play a part in even greater expansion. Several developments reflect the changed US regulatory climate around digital assets.

• May 2026: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approved KalshiEX’s BTCPERP in May, clearing the first CFTC-regulated crypto perpetual futures in the US.ⁱⁱ
• May 2026: Coinbase opened access to perpetual futures for US customers.ⁱⁱⁱ
• June 2026: Kraken launched in the US through a CFTC-licensed entity.^iv
• August 2026: Kalshi announced a CFTC regulatory filing to launch perpetuals tied to equity indexes.^v

As innovation and regulatory clarity drive greater adoption, the need to understand the operational implications will increase as well.

Funding replaces the calendar

In a dated future, the operations team closes and rolls the position before each expiry, a predictable calendar event they can staff, budget for, and plan around. Each of those moves is a trade in its own right, priced at execution and confirmed through settlement and clearing. At larger firms, that calendar has a dedicated owner.

Perps have no expiry. Instead, funding takes place within a short intraday window set by the venue. Each time, the venue reprices funding as the contract trades above or below spot, so both the size and the direction of the payment move with the market. The variations make it challenging to manage cash flow that can’t be fixed in advance. Margin, valuation, and settlement move intraday as well, each on a schedule set by the venue, so no single cutoff remains for the book to settle to.

Funding also moves the cost of carry into the open. In a dated future, carry hides in the basis and surfaces when the position shifts to the next contract. With perps, it changes hands as an explicit payment on every interval. The position’s P&L splits into the market move, the funding paid or received, and fees, leaving the back office to capture and attribute each line individually, several times a day, for every open position. This leaves attribution across market P&L, funding, and carry opaque until explicitly separated.

Processing built for continuity

The operational twist comes from funding payments, margin moves, and valuation marks, arriving while the trading day is still running. Reconciliation, collateral, and accounting assume an end-of-day workflow. Perps force each workflow to keep up event by event.

• Reconciliation: Matching against the venue’s records intraday means a break — such as a funding payment on the venue’s ledger that never hit your books — surfaces within hours of the event that caused it, rather than in the next morning’s run. That means operating at a cadence and scale that can stretch teams and operating models thin.
• Collateral: The venue holds the firm’s margin, funding pulls cash from that same pool, and the requirement moves with the market all day. With dated contracts, you have time to respond to margin calls. With perps, the venue liquidates the position automatically the moment collateral falls below its threshold. This speed means your treasury desk has to monitor collateral in real time rather than relying on a morning snapshot, ready to top up within minutes if the market turns.
• Accounting: Perps produce a funding entry at every venue interval and a valuation mark whenever it reprices. The ledger has to take entries around the clock across every position instead of once at the close. The books have to stay accurate with no end-of-day run to provide an accurate view of exposure and collateral. This pressure also accelerates the need to clear breaks as they surface, because an unresolved break affects the assets you are trading and collateralizing.

Each of those workflows has a multi-venue dimension as well.

One book across venues

As perps become more commonplace, firms will also have to address fragmentation. Your exposure on a single underlying position can include spot, dated futures, perpetuals, and options. Each instrument carries its own margin and settlement terms, so even one underlying position produces several positions to track apart from each other.

This challenge increases when you work in perps across multiple venues. There are decentralized venues such as Hyperliquid, which gained share on execution speed and fees, and centralized venues such as Galaxy, Binance, Kraken, OKX, and Bybit. Each sets its own funding, collateral, and margin mechanics. That market infrastructure places the onus on the firm to normalize every feed into one view of exposure and collateral. You have to translate each venue’s funding conventions, margin models, and collateral treatments into a common language before you can read your own net position. If you miss a venue’s convention, you end up funding or hedging against the distortion in your net exposure.

Margin can be especially problematic between venues. Some net margin across a trader’s positions. Others hold each position’s margin on its own. This inconsistency in cross-margining caps how efficiently you hold collateral against your entire book. Each venue margins your positions as if they were the whole book, which leaves cash sitting at venues instead of at work in your strategy.

Planning for a perp-ready operating model

Perps are another piece of the puzzle pulling institutional operations toward continuous, automated processing. The more substantial work comes down to working through operating model challenges that impact both your workflows and data. Having machinery that funds, margins, and reconciles positions throughout the day changes your operations around asset classes that may seem similar on the surface, such as contracted versus perpetual futures.

More innovation and scale are coming as well. Handling the number of continuously priced contracts within your reach will likely require automation and AI because they outstrip what any person or team can track by hand.

We put the readiness question in operational terms. Stand up event-by-event processing before the desk needs it. Test reconciliation and accounting at the venue’s cadence while the book is small. Then decide how you’ll assemble a single view of exposure and collateral from venues that each show only your slice. Doing that work early is the best way to build capabilities for perps and similar instruments over time.