The Derpetual Manifesto: my mad plan to fix
the world’s economy

Did you know that the world’s largest financial market runs on 19th century technology?

Derivatives (options, futures, forwards) are the largest asset class on Earth. They have over $5 quadrillion in exchange-traded volume per year. They underpin commodity prices, interest rates, and currency exchange.

And they run on architecture from the 1800s. Every major derivative type was invented before the telephone. Since then, we’ve had to fix their issues multiple times. We added electronic trading, cash settlement, and central clearing. But those are just patches on a design that was never meant for the modern world.

The underlying asset is a liability

In 2023, the London Metal Exchange halted nickel trading after it was discovered that some of its nickel shipments did not contain any nickel at all. Someone had replaced it with bags of rocks.

The fact that futures contracts end in delivery created room for fraud, even though the vast majority of traders close their contracts long before they expire.

Cash settlement, a mechanism where money is exchanged instead of physical goods, was supposed to fix this — but it’s just another patch. The entire architecture of derivatives markets (such as orderbooks, market makers, delivery infrastructure) is a pile of one hotfix on top of another.

Every single patch adds complication, which makes it harder for regular market participants to understand what they are trading, and creates structural risk in the market.

Current markets serve speculators, not businesses

If my company wants to avoid the risk of oil prices changing, I cannot hedge the actual price I pay to my supplier. I’m left with two only standardized contracts on standardized exchanges: WTI or Brent crude, because only those two have large enough liquidity.

The gap between the derivative I can trade and the risk I actually face is called basis risk, and managing it requires specialists who can model the mismatch and adjust positions continuously. Most companies can’t afford this. Most don’t try.

This isn’t an accident. Fewer markets with more concentrated liquidity is great for market makers and speculators. It is worse for every business that actually needs to hedge — which is most of them.

$5 quadrillion built on a few hundred assets

The entire derivatives market runs on roughly 500 to 1,000 underlying assets. A few major indices, a few dozen commodities, top currencies, benchmark interest rates.

Every other asset is missing. Residential real estate ($300 trillion in global value) has no meaningful derivatives market. Thousands of commodities are traded without futures. Of the world’s 60,000+ public companies, the vast majority have no options. Environmental indices, local economic indicators, the entire long tail of the global economy — zero coverage.

The unserved market is orders of magnitude larger than the served one.

This is what fixing the world economy looks like

When we make it possible to hedge the price of any asset, then business owners can secure themselves against any risk. The only thing that they have to care about is being good at their jobs. Everything else can be managed.

This extends to insurance: an open position in the right market is insurance, priced continuously by the market itself rather than by last quarter’s actuarial model.

And externalities get priced. If a derivatives market exists on the Air Quality Index in Mumbai, then building a polluting factory has a measurable, immediate financial cost — participants in that market lose money. Environmental regulation stops being a political argument and becomes an economic question with real numbers.

A chip manufacturer shouldn’t need to care about the Strait of Hormuz being closed, or the outcome of the next election, only making the best chips. I will make this a reality.

Derivatives are the plumbing of the global economy, and the plumbing currently reaches a tiny fraction of the system.

A derivative is just two people who disagree

When you look under the hood, a derivative is simple: one person thinks a number goes up, another thinks it goes down. When the outcome becomes clear, one pays the other.

Every other part of infrastructure that surrounds derivatives is something we added because we didn’t have a way to let traders settle directly. Now we do.

I call this asset class abstract futures, and they are the main product of Derpetual. When trading abstract futures, traders settle their gains and losses directly with each other, without going through an order book. This has an important implication: a market can exist wherever two people take opposing views on any number. There is no need for a market maker to fill up the order book first.

The full technical specification will be published separately.

We tested this on the hardest market imaginable

Abstract futures are already being used in production. Our tech is already running in production. Partner protocol derp.trade, built on top of it, lets users bet on memecoins, the most volatile, illiquid, unpredictable assets in existence. They've already cleared $4M+ in volume.

This initial deployment allows us to shape our technology with feedback from real traders, and test it on live markets.

If the mechanism survives memecoins, it can handle anything.

From crypto, via finance, into the undefined

In the last decade, blockchain finance has produced many innovations. Especially the speed of on-chain markets, and its resilience (e.g. Hyperliquid never fully halted trading, even after attacks.) DeFi turned out to be an unprecedented laboratory for financial engineering, and its inventions are now mature enough to bring to traditional finance.

Today, I’m proving the technology in crypto, the most demanding environment for financial experimentation. Next, I’m opening Derpetual as a protocol — so anyone can use our infrastructure to create derivatives on any asset. Then, I’m pursuing regulatory licenses to operate a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange.

I’m building the infrastructure for the next generation of derivatives, built for the 21st century. That is the goal.

Derivatives should be beautiful

I’m building Derpetual because I’m obsessed with the simple elegance of financial assets. A derivative, in its purest form, is one of the most beautiful structures in finance.

Two centuries of patches have buried that beauty under legacy infrastructure. Cash delivery, clearinghouses, price limits, trading halts — each solving a problem created by the last. The result works, barely, for a few hundred assets. It fails for everything else.

I want to make derivatives what they were always supposed to be: simple, universal, and precise. That’s what I’m building.

— Antoni