The cost of trading crypto

We need to talk about the cost of trading crypto. It’s the most expensive asset class on the planet to trade. And it’s obvious why.

The biggest product is perps. Ninety trillion dollars a year. Almost none of it has any independent clearing.

Perps, where most of the volume is, almost nothing is cleared.

This makes crypto massively expensive to trade. As much as we want to bring together the benefits of instant settlement, tokenised collateral, all of these things that can make a big difference to the process and the cost, none of it will make a dent in traditional markets if the cost of capital to trade is still so much higher than tradfi.

We can’t claim that “banks aren’t adopting stablecoins” when the infrastructure to use them costs more in capital than traditional systems.

Perps caught on because they’re accessible to retail. The infrastructure hasn’t kept up. A neutral clearing venue would change the economics entirely. It’s time for us all to build the infrastructure to make this possible.

#DerivativesClearing #CryptoInfrastructure #InstitutionalCrypto #MarketStructure

This first appeared on LinkedIn on 23 March 2026. If you want to comment or discuss, that’s the place.