- Perpetual futures became Nvidia’s weekend price-discovery venue. At 3 p.m. ET on Sunday, well before premarket equity trading started, traders began placing bearish bets on Nvidia perps, with Hyperliquid’s xyz contract slipping as low as $180.15 on $200 million of volume by 3:30 p.m. ET, CNBC reported.
- The perps called the direction. Both Nvidia shares and perps fell below $178 overnight, and the stock traded 7% lower on Monday as news of CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy and the board’s investigation sank in.
- Other new products also lit up. A Kalshi contract on when Huang might leave as CEO, listed just days before the reports, saw more than $105,000 traded on Sunday, and newly launched premarket options on Nvidia saw $15 million of premium across about 40,000 contracts, with just under $10 million in puts, or about two-thirds of the premium by our calculation, according to SpotGamma data.
- Market-structure veterans say the gap is real. “Perps have filled a significant gap or void in the market,” said former exchange analyst Rich Repetto, while Hyperliquid Strategies CEO David Schamis said investors want “deep liquidity and price discovery when it is needed, not just nine-to-five.”
What Happened?
Nvidia’s scandal broke on a Sunday, when traditional U.S. exchanges were closed, forcing investors to look elsewhere for a price. Perpetual futures, highly leveraged bets that never expire and trade around the clock, moved first: Hyperliquid’s xyz Nvidia contract dropped to $180.15 within 30 minutes of the first bearish bets, on $200 million in volume. Prediction-market traders piled into a Kalshi contract on Huang’s potential exit, and premarket options on Nvidia, which only began trading weeks ago, drew $15 million in premium. CNBC noted perps played a similar role in April 2024, when Iran’s weekend drone attack on Israel left crypto-native venues as the only real-time proxy for oil and S&P 500 sentiment.
Why It Matters?
The episode is a live demonstration of how 24/7 venues are eroding the weekend information gap for U.S. stocks. For investors, the signal was useful: the weekend perp price pointed toward the sharp drop that followed when U.S. equity trading opened. The put-heavy premarket options flow also shows hedging demand is shifting earlier in the day as exchanges extend hours. That raises questions about leverage, liquidity and oversight on offshore or crypto-native platforms, but the demand is clear, as options contributor Mike Khouw put it: “When the markets close, we lose real-time feedback.”
What’s Next?
Expect more investors to watch weekend perp pricing on major U.S. stocks, especially around event risk like Nvidia’s Nov. 17 earnings. The growth of perps, prediction markets and extended-hours options will likely draw more attention from U.S. regulators and traditional exchanges racing to lengthen trading hours. For Hyperliquid and the HYPE token, Sunday’s volume is a showcase of the use case beyond crypto.
