韩国相关资产离岸永续合约成交放大，但缺少可交易的公司级新增催化

Perpetual futures tied to the KORU exchange-traded fund listed in the United States drew $24.1 billion, or about 33 trillion won, in trading volume on crypto exchanges this month alone. Markets for Korea-linked assets are expanding rapidly on the back of stablecoins and on-chain financial infrastructure.
KORU perpetual futures traded on 12 venues — including the crypto exchanges Binance, OKX and Bybit and decentralized exchanges such as Hyperliquid — totaled $24.06 billion between the 1st and the 24th of this month, according to Tiger Research, a Web3 research firm, on the 28th.
That is 2.69 times the volume of the KORU ETF itself over the same period. KORU is a leveraged ETF that tracks the Korean stock market at three times its daily move. Rather than holding the actual ETF, KORU perpetual futures let investors bet on price swings using stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) as margin.
Perpetual futures are contracts with no expiration date, allowing traders to hold positions without rolling them over. Instead, buyers and sellers exchange funding payments, typically every one to eight hours, to keep the futures price aligned with the spot price. An exchange does not need to list a stock directly — linking the price feed is enough to allow round-the-clock trading on that asset's moves. On Binance, KORU perpetual futures carry a minimum trade size of 5 USDT. With five-times leverage, a position can be opened with about 1 USDT in margin, and maximum leverage runs to 20 times. Analysts say the low cost of entry is driving up trading volume.
Across all Korea-linked assets, cumulative perpetual futures volume from February through this month came to about 307 trillion won. The figure sums the notional value of contracts executed on those exchanges by period. Last month's volume alone reached 166 trillion won, roughly four times the 42 trillion won in combined volume at Korea's five largest crypto exchanges that same month.
"What matters is that a separate infrastructure is being built to trade existing financial assets on the basis of round-the-clock trading and stablecoin settlement," said Cho Yoon-sung, a senior researcher at Tiger Research. "We need to watch where global demand for Korean assets accumulates as trading activity and price signals."
As volume has grown, liquidity deep enough to absorb large orders has begun to form. Perpetual futures volume on SK hynix rose from 5% of the company's domestic spot trading volume in June to 31% in July and 46% in August. Over the past 15 days, the average gap between the expected price and the actual execution price on a $1 million trade was 0.0703 to 0.1194 percentage points on Binance and Hyperliquid. That means the difference between the price at the time of the order and the average fill price was only about 0.07% to 0.12%, indicating that even large orders were absorbed without moving market prices much.
Some worry that if offshore liquidity keeps growing, price signals for Korean assets could form first in offshore derivatives markets rather than in the domestic spot market. When new information is reflected in offshore prices overnight and on weekends while Korean exchanges are closed, arbitrage by market makers may follow once trading resumes. "When trading rises or prices swing sharply in the derivatives market, market makers' hedging needs change, and their trades can affect spot prices," Cho said. "It is a structure in which the 'wag the dog' phenomenon can emerge, with derivatives moving the price of the underlying asset."
A more notable shift is the changing nature of the funding and collateral behind that liquidity. Tokenized products backed by U.S. Treasuries, such as BlackRock's BUIDL and Hashnote's USYC, are being used as trading collateral on venues including Binance and Deribit. Institutions can connect assets held in custody to exchanges and collateral management systems and deploy them for hedging, arbitrage and market making. As institutional assets join a market that began with retail leveraged trading, the scope of on-chain finance is widening from coin trading to institutional finance spanning custody, collateral, trading and settlement.
The United States has already begun pulling perpetual futures, which grew offshore, inside its regulatory perimeter. In May, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved KalshiEX's bitcoin perpetual contract as a futures product. President Donald Trump said on the 19th that the CFTC was working to bring the perpetual futures market and Hyperliquid into the United States in a legal and compliant manner. Unlisted companies such as Anthropic, along with the Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies, are already trading in offshore markets before any stock listing.
In Korea, by contrast, critics say the regulatory framework is failing to keep pace with the market. In February last year, the Financial Services Commission said it would begin allowing about 3,500 entities, including listed companies and firms registered as professional investors, to trade cryptocurrencies on a pilot basis in the second half of that year. More than a year later, no start date has been set for corporate trading for investment or treasury purposes, and discussions on derivatives have made little headway. According to data submitted by the Financial Supervisory Service to Rep. Park Sang-hyuk of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's National Policy Committee, there were 6,590 corporate accounts registered at Korea's five largest crypto exchanges at the end of July, but only 29 had been used even once for trading, deposits or withdrawals.
With spot markets, derivatives, collateral and settlement interlocking on a single trading network and on-chain finance extending into traditional capital markets, some argue Korea should phase in market participation by companies and financial firms and build a foundation for handling derivatives within the regulatory system. "Discussions on connecting derivatives, collateral and settlement into a single on-chain financial framework need to move forward," a financial industry official said.