Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and OKX announced Friday that they will join forces to launch perpetual oil futures.
In a joint statement, the companies said ICE futures prices for Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) will bolster new perpetual contracts on OKX.
The new perpetual contracts based on ICE data will open access to benchmark energy products to 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, in which ICE has a stake, in all territories where the crypto company is already licensed to offer perpetual futures.
“Oil markets are critical to the global economy,” Haider Rafique, global managing partner at OKX, said in the statement. Bringing ICE benchmarks “to regulated perpetual futures is exactly the kind of bridge between traditional and digital markets that market participants have been asking for.”
ICE and OKX’s foray into oil criminals comes as Hyperliquid’s never-expiring oil futures contracts have proven to be a tremendous success, consistently generating approximately $1.6 billion in daily trading volume and over $1.3 billion in open interest.
Perpetual futures, also known as “perps,” are a type of derivatives contract that gives traders the ability to bet on the prices of assets such as oil or bitcoin. But unlike traditional futures, offenders never expire, so traders don’t have to take possession of physical barrels of oil or renew those 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. in the US, but Michael Selig, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), recently said he will soon bring them under his agency’s supervision.
In a sign of the growing confluence of crypto and traditional financial (TradFi) companies, ICE and OKX signed an agreement in March to build technology, including blockchain networks, that would give ICE clients access to cryptocurrency-based futures and OKX clients the ability to trade tokenized securities on the NYSE platform. ICE also made a strategic investment that valued the San Jose, California-based company at $25 billion.
