Ben Delo

Three years ago, I sat down with BitMEX's Ben Delo to find out how he came up with the idea for the perpetual future. That gave rise to a Bloomberg column where I argued that perps were one of the most important inventions to come out of crypto. A lot has happened since then, not least the shift to a much tighter dollar liquidity environment and the legitimization of stablecoins. My hunch was always that the perp would become an important tool in pricing marginal dollar liquidity, especially at the intersection of on and offshore markets. With the normalization of stablecoins in the core dollar economy, that pricing signal is only going to become more critical. That's caused me to revisit my notes, and dive even deeper into that origin story and why it matters for dollar funding markets today (all the more so given talk of dollar coalitions of the willing guarding against potential dollar swapline cut-offs by the Fed). The conclusion is that perps could be the pathway to a shadow-dollar interest rate that competes with the Fed's own rate. Check out the full story here 👇 thepeg.co/p/long-read-the-un… teapawt.net/cashequivalence/status…