Crypto exchanges chase TradFi commodities market as pricing gaps persist

Cryptocurrency exchanges are taking a growing market share from traditional finance (TradFi) trading venues through tokenized commodities products, but the mainstream adoption of tokenized precious metals remains limited by pricing and liquidity issues.

Silver perpetuals have reached about 40% of the equivalent volume of the Comex Silver (SI) Contract at their peak, the world’s largest silver futures market, which accounts for over 70% of global exchange-traded silver futures volume, according to a Thursday report from Binance Research.

During March and April, tokenized silver accounted for 14.90% and 14.98% of the Comex’s volume, respectively, up from just 1.37% in January.

The growth suggests crypto exchanges are capturing more demand for round-the-clock exposure to traditional assets, particularly in metals-linked perpetuals, but analysts at Kaiko said liquidity depth and price formation still pose major obstacles to wider adoption among traditional investors.

Average Aggregated TradFi-Perps Volume to The Primary Futures Equivalents on Traditional Exchanges. Source: Binance Research

Crypto TradFi perps need reliable pricing, strong liquidity

Tokenized commodities offer 24/7 trading, which can create vulnerabilities compared to TradFi gold and silver futures, where the holiday and weekend close create “natural circuit breakers that actually protect market quality,” Kaiko research analyst Laurens Fraussen told Cointelegraph.

This exposes tokenized commodities to degraded order book debt, widened spreads and less reference pricing from closed traditional venues.

Legacy commodities offerings avoid these issues through centralized clearing, consolidated liquidity, standardized contracts and “coordinated operating hours that prevent liquidity deserts,” Fraussen said, adding that crypto needs “better chain abstraction and unified liquidity aggregation” to compete with TradFi.

Related: NYSE taps Securitize for 24/7 tokenized securities platform

Despite the infrastructure concerns, tokenized gold perps have surpassed the gold futures trading volumes of several regional commodity exchanges, a trend seeing monthly acceleration, according to Binance Research.

Figure 3: Average Aggregated Volume of Gold-Perps to Gold Futures in Regional Exchanges, in March

Binance Research also said gold perpetuals outpaced several regional commodity exchanges in March, reaching 401% compared to gold futures trading on the Japanese energy commodities futures exchange TOCOM, 228% of India’s Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) and 216% of the Dubai Gold & Commodities Exchange (DGCX).

Binance attributed part of this growth to “market-moving events” that routinely occur on weekends, which would leave investors exposed to gap risks through traditional venues operating under regular trading hours.

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