ICE’s Sprecher: Hyperliquid is ‘Wake Up Call’
Jeffrey Sprecher, chair and chief executive of Intercontinental Exchange, said Hyperliquid is a wake up call for the industry as institutions watch price discovery over the weekends on the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform.
Hyperliquid gained attention when tokenized commodities and perpetual futures continued to trade on the DeFi platform after the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran in February when traditional exchanges were closed over the weekend.
Sam Gaer, chief investment officer of Monarq Asset Management and former chief information officer at Nymex, said on X at the time: “Price discovery and risk transfer — two of the most important functions an exchange performs — for gold, silver, and oil during the most consequential geopolitical event of 2026 did not occur on the CME, NYMEX, or ICE. They occurred on Hyperliquid. A permissionless, on-chain perpetual futures exchange priced risk and facilitated hedging in real time while every traditional venue with a market cap above $20 billion was dark.”
Sprecher spoke at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on 27 May 2026. He said most of ICE’s institutional clients cannot trade on an unregulated DeFi platform but they are all watching the price discovery for when traditional markets open.
“The rise of retail in the equity markets has been phenomenal and that is happening in all markets,” he added. “We are going to have to get used to the interplay of retail and professional trading, 24/7, 365 days a year.”
ICE has 13 exchanges and six clearinghouses around the world to “follow the sun” but can only transfer money when banks are open. Sprecher believes that the end state is that value will be exchanged over the internet as assets are tokenized and encrypted. As a result, ICE will not have to hold excess capital from market participants for clearing as money can move faster and more efficiently.
“As we move to 24×7, 365 day trading of assets around the world capital is going to move onto the internet,” he added.
Hyperliquid has early adopter market participants, according to Sprecher, as it is blockchain-based, settled algorithmically with stablecoins and allows leverage of up to 100×1. He knows the team at Hyperliquid well and described them as extremely smart people who have built a true DeFi exchange. Sprecher has met the Hyperliquid team to talk about what they are doing, what ICE is doing and where they could work together.
Derivatives of shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been trading on Hyperliquid before the rocket company is due to go public on 11 June 2026. Sprecher said he is withholding judgement on whether this market works for price discovery and whether that price impacts the IPO.
“I think regulators and market participants are going to say either it was irrelevant or it was highly relevant,” he added.
There have been press reports that ICE and CME Group have raised objections about Hyperliquid to regulators.
“We are not freaked out about Hyperliquid as we are helping them understand our world and they are helping us understand their world,” said Sprecher.
Despite not trading at weekends, on 27 May 2026 ICE reported record liquidity across its global natural gas and power markets, including record open interest (OI) across North American natural gas. ICE reached record total OI across its futures and options markets of 130.5 million contracts. Its commodity markets hit record OI of 77 million on May 22, 2026, while energy options hit record OI of 31 million.
Trabue Bland, SVP of Futures Markets at ICE, said in a statement: “The record open interest reflects how participants worldwide turn to ICE’s deeply liquid energy markets to navigate the increasingly interconnected and dynamic price environment we are in. That liquidity, combined with ICE’s portfolio margining methodology, IRM 2, is crucial for our customers who benefit from a margin model that captures correlations across energy exposures when they are trading diversified or hedged portfolios across ICE, resulting in precise margin treatment.”
Perpetual futures
However, ICE is asking regulators why there cannot be a level playing field. For example, Sprecher compared perpetual futures to swaps in traditional finance, which require regulatory reporting and where there are definitions on who is a swap dealer, and regulations over margin and how they are liquidated.
On 29 May 2026 the CFTC said in a statement that it had approved KalshiEX, a designated contract market, to list the BTCPERP Contract, a perpetual contract that references the spot price of bitcoin, as a futures contract and had approved a request from Coinbase Financial Markets (CFM), a registered futures commission merchant, to offer certain digital commodity derivatives products listed on CFM’s affiliated foreign board of trade, Deribit FZE. The U.S regulator also said in a policy statement that there will be a case-by-case review process for listing perpetual contracts.
Hyperliquid Police Center said: “We look forward to engaging closely with the Commission to ensure that the framework it develops is workable not only for centralized intermediaries, but for the onchain protocols where the most significant perpetuals activity actually occurs.”
Shaunda Devens, analyst at Blockworks, said: “To be compliant, U.S. perps had to take two steps back to fit this legacy system. For example, instead of simply listing a crypto-native perp, Coinbase Derivatives acquired a DCM, worked through Nodal Clear, and structured its product as a five-year, cash-settled futures contract, with funding handled through clearinghouse cash adjustments.
This framework therefore created a lot of complexity:
-Exchanges can’t list any asset they want. They need to be a DCM, acquire a DCM, or list through one.
-Expiries, funding, and settlement mechanics need to be adjusted to fit legacy infrastructure.
Importantly, it structurally prevents brokers from using exchanges like Hyperliquid that do not meet the legacy criteria of a DCM.
While this new order does not remove those complexities, it does allow a true no-expiry BTC perp instead of the five-year expiry workaround.
Still, it points to the CFTC genuinely being willing to innovate and make perps fit into existing frameworks. Over time, hopefully that framework expands to also include crypto-native exchange layers like Hyperliquid as true market layers.
OKX
On 5 March 2026 ICE said in a statement that it had invested in OKX, a blockchain technology and trading company serving more than 120 million people globally. ICE’s investment reflects a valuation of OKX of $25bn. The companies intend to evaluate joint initiatives across market structure design, clearing and risk management, data, and institutional access to digital assets.
Specher said ICE has applied to the SEC to tokenize stocks at the New York Stock Exchange but “the reality is the market doesn’t want us to tokenize stocks at the NYSE.” Therefore, ICE has set up an ATS (alternative trading system) for trading equities 24×7, 365 days a year, which is waiting for SEC approval, and OKX will add distribution. ICE wants to distribute tokenized in Asia and will help OKX become a regulated U.S broker dealer.
In addition, NYSE has connected to a blockchain market for settlement.
“We are running that in our own data center,” said Sprecher. “It’s not public, but we proved we can do it.”
The NYSE processes 1.7 trillion transactions every day, and Sprecher said there is not currently any chain that can handle that volume.
“The best chains are good enough to net positions relatively quickly and move collateral near instantaneously but not at the same speed that trades are being done,” he added. “The big banks are working with us to accommodate that wiring and network and I think it will happen pretty organically, but relatively quickly.”
Polymarket
In October 2025, ICE made an initial direct $1bn investment in prediction market Polymarket. In March this year ICE completed a new $600m direct cash investment in Polymarket, which was part of an equity capital fundraising by Polymarket.
Sprecher said ICE made the investment because Polymarket is a true DeFi exchange in its absolute form with no oversight and the group is interested in that technology. He added: “The market determines what is going to happen, what products trade, and how they settle as stablecoin collateral is algorithmically attached to each trade.”
Polymarket’s technology does not fit with U.S. regulation, and ICE has been helping the prediction market articulate what could be modified to allow it to be U.S. compliant. ICE has also been spending a lot of time with the CFTC to talk about the core principles that legacy exchanges are subject to and how those might apply to a DeFi exchange.
ICE distributes Polymarket’s data to financial institutions Sprecher believes there will be “tremendous” growth of economic data that is benchmarked and traded in prediction markets and on legacy exchanges as institutional and retail investors come together to discover prices and inputs.
“It was kind of a marriage where we will help them, they help us and let’s see if we can move the market along,” added Sprecher.
