As demand for gold exposure surges, brokers and professional traders are increasingly looking for efficient, always-on access to traditional assets, whether through spot, CFDs or perpetual futures (perps).
For Jenna Wright, managing director for digital assets at LMAX Group, the growing role of perps is crucial to the next phase of market structure and a sign that crypto-native market structure is moving into traditional assets.
CP: When did LMAX move into the ‘perps’ space?
JW: We launched our perpetual futures offering in 2025, built on AWS, so the product is available on the cloud. That was a new approach for us because historically we’ve used physical data centres, but in this instance we took a very perp-native approach.
Every perp venue out there is cloud-based, and we’ve built functionality that we’ve never had before in any of the other execution venues. It works well, because as we know, everything is traded on perp venues now.
CP: How does that fit with wider market trends?
JW: Suddenly the whole world is moving towards this 24/7 approach and internally, we do FX, commodities and digital assets, and we’ve almost operated in silos for quite a while. In the last couple of years though, we’ve started working towards being at the helm of the convergence of TradFi and digital assets.
We’re seeing crypto-native products and established asset classes come together, so it really solidifies our thought process of bringing the two client types together to trade the same products.
CP: Why are perps such an easy entry point?
JW: Regulation does present a barrier here, particularly in the US where banks and custodians aren’t allowed to touch Bitcoin, although that could soon change. We’ve been speaking about traditional institutions moving into the digital assets space for the best part of eight years. But, if regulation from the US brings more clarity and openness to digital assets, we should be in really good shape for real capital to be deployed.
When you introduce perps, it’s a gamechanger for retail brokers. At the moment, every Friday night, because their clients are trading on leverage, they have to start reducing their clients’ positions because market gapping is an issue. Geopolitical events do happen at the weekend, so many times a market closes at one price and opens at another, we can’t take that risk, and as a broker with all their retail end users, they can’t take that risk. Perps offer a solution to that problem.
The appetite for that has really grown recently. Back in 2018 when we started working on our digital asset offerings, some banks were laughing me out of the room saying, ‘We aren’t going to work weekends’, but now most institutions have accepted that this is the way the market is going.
CP: What are the barriers that need to be addressed?
JW: Regulation has always been the main issue. LMAX is a UK-based company, and around 40% of foreign exchange happens in London, so we’re used to being the FX capital of the world. Unfortunately, the framework for digital assets has been slow here.
Because of that, we launched LMAX Digital in Gibraltar in 2018 as that’s where the first framework for digital assets was. Now, all eyes are on the US to get that clarity.
Another is around post-trade settlement. At the moment we’re trading around $50 billion a day in FX, commodities and digital assets, and the bulk of that trading happens bilaterally, so essentially we’re the technology and we host the trade from bank A to trade against bank B, or whatever the case may be. We aren’t involved in the settlement part.
If that model was brought into this digital world, it could scale significantly, but it’s limited around capital today. The ultimate infrastructure goal would be to have a prime broker that provides you with a line at all the exchanges on which you would like to trade, and then your balance sheet is much smaller, you don’t have to move collateral around the entire time.
CP: What’s next for LMAX in terms of perps?
JW: We launched the gold perp in February, and next we’re looking to launch an index. Everyone’s pretty interested in S&P 500, but we’re still in the research phase.
We’ve never offered equities, because it’s quite complicated, and very different to FX and commodities. This would be a really nice entry point to list a small handful of equity perps that we could offer our retail broker clients.
We’ll be agile in listing and always be led by the market. So, we’ll hopefully be trading them whether it’s a fad or not.
