Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and OKX announced Friday that they are joining forces to deploy perpetual oil futures contracts.
In a joint statement, the companies said ICE’s Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures prices would strengthen new perpetual contracts on OKX.
ICE’s new data-driven perpetual contracts will open access to energy benchmark 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 authorized to offer perpetual futures contracts.
“Oil markets are critical to the global economy,” Haider Rafique, global managing partner of OKX, said in the release. Integrating ICE benchmarks “into regulated perpetual futures contracts is exactly the kind of bridge between traditional and digital markets that market participants have been calling for.”
ICE and OKX’s foray into the oil sector comes as Hyperliquid’s never-expiring oil futures contracts have proven to be a huge success, regularly generating around $1.6 billion in daily trading volume and more than $1.3 billion in open interest.
Perpetual futures, also called “perps,” are a type of derivative contract that gives traders the ability to bet on the prices of assets such as oil or bitcoin. But unlike traditional futures contracts, futures contracts never expire, so traders do not 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 that traditional commodities exchanges such as ICE and CME Group Inc. are in the United States, but Michael Selig, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), recently said he would soon bring them under his agency’s oversight.
In a sign of the growing convergence of crypto companies and traditional financial companies (TradFi), ICE and OKX signed an agreement in March to build technology, including blockchain networks, that would give ICE clients access to crypto-based futures contracts and OKX clients the ability to trade tokenized securities on the NYSE platform. ICE also made a strategic investment valuing the San Jose, California-based company at $25 billion.
