Mecone: The Financial Infrastructure for Perps on Anything

At Mecone we believe the financial system is heading towards a future where everything will be tradeable. We engineer continuously-updating benchmarks for assets the world has always treated as illiquid, and let exchanges offer the Perps that reference them. We start with macroeconomic indicators and pre-IPO companies. We end with a financial system where every asset class has a liquid market built around it.

The Opportunity

Perpetual futures (“Perps”) are the most important financial primitive in recent memory. In 2025 alone, offshore exchanges processed over $93 trillion in Perp trading volume, expanding beyond crypto into more traditional derivatives markets (e.g., public equities, commodities, FX). The explosion of Perps overseas stems from their structural features: no rollover, no settlement date, deep concentrated liquidity, and pure economic exposure without the capital costs of holding the underlying.

Put simply, Perps offer traders the purest medium for taking a leveraged directional view on the value of an underlying asset.

Despite their growth and promise, many of the global economy’s largest and most economically significant asset classes, including real estate, AI-Compute, private equity, venture capital, private credit, and fine art, have remained largely untouched by Perps.

The reason is simple: because of the unique characteristics of Perps (the same structural reasons that account for their popularity), they only function on underlyings with a continuously updating reference price, and for many assets, transactions are not frequent enough to provide that infrastructure.

For these “illiquid assets,” price discovery only surfaces at discrete events: an art auction, a home sale, a funding round. Some have sporadically-updating benchmarks, like the Case-Shiller indices for real estate.

But for Perps, this infrequent indication of an underlying’s value is not enough. For a Perp to function the oracle price cannot update once a month; it must update continuously. As a result, Perps have been confined to assets that already have this infrastructure, leaving a vast swath of the global economy largely untradeable using Perps.

Prediction Markets as Synthetic Spot Markets

The opportunity is making anything tradeable with Perps. But the problem remains: how do you generate a continuously updating reference price such that exchanges can expand their Perp offerings to illiquid assets and beyond?

To function, a Perp does not need the underlying asset to have a liquid spot market (in its most literal form). All a Perp needs is a continuously updating proxy that faithfully tracks the value of the underlying.

A prediction market can be that proxy.

Like any traditional spot market, prediction markets allow the instantaneous exchange of an asset — the event contract on a given question — for cash. The main difference between the synthetic spot market and a normal spot market is that what we’re buying is only a representation of the actual underlying.

For example, a synthetic spot market for fine art allows participants to take positions on the value of an art piece without actually gaining ownership of the physical underlying. But in practice this is essentially analogous to buying and selling in an actual art spot market (like an auction). In both instances, participants express their views on the value of the artwork in the form of financial commitments that settle instantaneously for cash.

The practice of referencing a synthetic spot rather than a real one is well established: some Oil Perps on Hyperliquid use the front-month CME oil futures contract as an oracle, with market makers hedging in the CME contract rather than in physical oil markets. There, the front-month contract stands in as a more liquid representation of the current price of physically delivered oil. Our hybrid market construction takes an analogous approach: the prediction market is the spot market, standing in for an illiquid underlying that has no tradeable spot of its own, and the index we build from it is the oracle the Perp references.

Turning a Forecast into a Price

The synthetic spot market gives us a continuously-updating market-implied probability distribution over the underlying’s value at its next release.

Sometimes a future price acts as a faithful representation of the current price of the underlying, such as the aforementioned Oil Perps on Hyperliquid. But this isn’t always the case. Often, the basis between the future price and the current price is too large for that future price to stand in for the present. This is the norm for illiquid assets: real estate, fine art, and pre-IPO companies, where the next mark is distant, and macroeconomic indicators, where the data itself is lagged. In these cases a true current price must be constructed. The value of a current price extends beyond deriving a functional oracle for a Perp: it serves as an anchor for primary market transactions, as a mark for portfolio valuation and lending, and, of course, as a reference for trading other structured products.

Deriving a current price from an expected future price creates a central challenge. A prediction market on next month’s CPI tells us where the market expects CPI to be when it is released, not what CPI is today.

Our core innovation is the step that transforms this forward-looking distribution into a continuously-updating present price. We achieve this by reconciling the expectation of a future price with some known past value to derive a current price. Basing our index on a known past value serves as a tangible reference anchoring it to reality. The result is a live benchmark that leans on known information while continuously incorporating new data as it arrives, providing the present-value oracle required for Perps.

Towards a Trade Anything Future

At Mecone we believe the financial system is heading towards a future where everything will be tradeable. We engineer continuously-updating benchmarks for assets the world has always treated as illiquid, and let exchanges offer the Perps that reference them. We start with macroeconomic indicators and pre-IPO companies. We end with a financial system where every asset class has a liquid market built around it. A world where a venture capital firm can hedge its private portfolio in real time. Where a homeowner can hedge their property’s value the same way an importer hedges commodity price risk. We are building the future of the derivatives market, one asset at a time.