The inside story of how a hike in Hong Kong changed crypto trading forever

Perps Week 2026The inside story of how a hike in Hong Kong changed crypto trading forever"We were a scrappy startup," Delo said of BitMEX back in 2016, when it launched the first perpetual future. "We thought, ‘Just get it out there. If it was any good, the market would show us.’"By Oliver Knight|Edited by Cheyenne Ligon Jul 29, 2026, 9:53 am EDTPresented byIt was sometime in 2015, on a hiking trail in Hong Kong, that the perpetual swap — also called a perpetual future or a “perp” for short — was born. Ben Delo, the mathematician and co-founder of BitMEX, was walking with a friend called Bavik, a derivatives trader, wrestling with a problem that had been nagging at him for months.BitMEX had been trying everything. Quarterly futures, monthly futures, weekly futures, 48-hour futures, even a contract that lasted just 24 hours before resetting. Nothing was working. Customers kept complaining that their positions were closing without warning. They wanted something that looked like spot, traded like spot, but gave them the leverage that only a derivatives exchange could offer."What if a future never expired?" Delo asked.Bavik's answer was immediate. "Mathematically, it would be worth infinity," Delo recalls him saying.Technically, he was right. A futures contract's value is partly derived from the time remaining until expiry and the cost of carrying the position. Remove the expiry date and that carrying cost compounds indefinitely, making the theoretical value infinite. But then Bavik offered a solution: just charge traders the bitcoin overnight rate, the way you might charge LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) in traditional finance.There was one problem. "I said, what's that?" Delo recalls. "He said, ‘Hm, just charge them the overnight bitcoin interest rate’. I said, ‘I don't think that exists.’"So Delo built it. And in doing so, he invented one of the most consequential financial products of the 21st century.Building BitMEXTo understand why the perpetual swap matt…

The inside story of how a hike in Hong Kong changed crypto trading forever

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