Monthly trading volume for equity perpetual futures on major cryptocurrency exchanges surged to roughly $250 billion in July, a seventeenfold increase from about $15 billion in April, according to data from analytics firm CryptoQuant. The explosive growth, detailed in a report published Aug. 13, underscores how rapidly crypto venues are becoming round-the-clock marketplaces for contracts tied to traditional stocks.

These perpetual contracts, which carry no expiration date and use periodic funding payments to keep prices aligned with underlying equities, allow traders to gain exposure to publicly traded companies without being constrained by Wall Street trading hours. The result is that crypto exchanges now function as 24/7 trading…