There is a fundamental shift in the behavior of retail traders on cryptocurrency exchanges, who are massively switching from speculating in memcoins to trading perpetual futures on shares of companies related to artificial intelligence and semiconductor manufacturing. According to data from analytical platforms, the trading volume of perpetual contracts for shares of issuers such as SK Hynix, Micron Technology and SanDisk on the Hyperliquid platform exceeded eight billion dollars over the past week. On Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, the average daily turnover of similar instruments increased from $85 million in February to $5.5 billion in July, which representatives of the site characterize as an unprecedented increase in demand for derivatives linked to traditional assets.

This transformation of market conditions has attracted the attention of institutional investors and hedge funds, who use the emerging price imbalances for arbitrage strategies. With a significant preponderance of long positions, professional market participants acquire underlying assets on the spot market and simultaneously open short positions in perpetual contracts on cryptocurrency platforms, profiting from financing rates. When the number of long positions exceeds a certain threshold, their holders are required to pay a commission to participants who have opened short positions, which creates additional opportunities for hedging and speculation in a fragmented market structure.

In parallel with the growing interest in technology sector stocks, there is a systemic decline in activity in the memcoin segment, the total capitalization of which decreased by about $ 100 billion during 2025. Dogecoin, the leading asset in this category, has lost more than 40 percent of its value since the beginning of this year and almost 80 percent since the beginning of 2025. Experts attribute the end of the next cycle of speculative hype to the launch of controversial tokens associated with political figures, as well as to the general tightening of monetary conditions and the flow of liquidity into more fundamentally sound assets, such as shares of artificial intelligence companies.

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The material has been prepared solely for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or recommendation.