A study in the Journal of Financial Markets by Carol Alexander and co-authors found that perpetual swaps on unregulated venues were the strongest instruments for bitcoin price discovery, with regulated futures and U.S. spot exchanges reacting to, rather than leading, those moves.
Other work has identified Binance’s perpetual market as the primary source of price formation across the fragmented crypto landscape.
The evidence is not conclusive, however, and some studies find spot still leads at certain frequencies or during stress. But the direction of the literature over the past few years has been toward the derivatives market as the place where the price is made.
“Historically, we have seen perps leading mostly during bear market price rallies,” Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told CoinDesk. “For example, Bitcoin perps demand growth (blue bars in the chart) led the price rallies of January 2026, and April-May 2026.”
“In these periods, spot demand was contracting, while perps demand expanded, thus the perpetual futures market was leading prices despite demand contracting on the spot market,” he said.
Which brings us back to the funding rate. Because a perpetual contract never settles, nothing forces its price back toward spot the way an expiry date does for a traditional future. Instead, every few hours, whichever side of the trade is crowded pays the other.
