Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and OKX announced Friday that they are joining forces to roll out perpetual oil futures.
In a joint statement, the firms said ICE futures prices for Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) will underpin the new perpetual contracts on OKX.
The new perpetual contracts based on ICE’s data will open up energy benchmark product access for OKX’s 120 million retail traders, said Trabue Bland, senior vice president of futures exchanges at ICE.
The new contracts will be available on OKX, where ICE owns a stake, across territories where the crypto company is already licensed to offer perpetual futures.
“Oil markets are critical to the world economy,” Haider Rafique, global managing partner at OKX, said in the statement. Bringing ICE’s benchmarks “into regulated perpetual futures is exactly the kind of bridge between traditional and digital markets that market participants have been asking for.”
The ICE and OKX foray into oil criminals comes as Hyperliquid’s never-expiring oil futures contracts have proven to be a huge success, consistently generating around $1.6 billion in daily trading volume and more than $1.3 billion in open interest.
Perpetual futures, also known as “perps”, are a type of derivative contract that allows traders to bet on the prices of assets such as oil or bitcoin. But unlike traditional futures, perps never expire, so traders don’t need to take possession of physical barrels of oil or roll over these contracts.
Most perpetual products are offered on offshore exchanges and are not regulated in the same way as traditional commodity exchanges such as ICE and CME Group Inc. are in the United States, but Michael Selig, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), recently said he will soon bring them under his agency’s oversight.
In a sign of the increasing merging of crypto and traditional financial (TradFi) businesses, ICE and OKX signed an agreement in March to build technology, including blockchain networks, that would give ICE’s clients access to crypto-based futures and OKX clients the ability to trade tokenized securities on the NYSE’s platform. ICE also made a strategic investment that valued the San Jose, California-based company at $25 billion.
