BitMEX, which helped popularize perpetual swaps in the crypto market, has selected Chainlink to provide price feeds for its new “Equity Perps” suite, the companies announced on social media. “BitMEX, the inventor of the cryptocurrency PERP, has chosen Chainlink to power its new stock PERP. Data Streams provides fast and reliable data, opening the door to a new generation of markets across stocks, ETFs, and more,” Chainlink said in a short post.
The move puts Chainlink’s Data Streams, a low-latency oracle service built for high-throughput market data, at the center of BitMEX’s efforts to offer derivatives related to traditional stocks and exchange-traded funds. Chainlink’s Data Streams product is designed to provide continuous sub-second pricing from multiple market sources, which projects and exchanges claim is necessary to execute liquid, fair, perpetual contracts referencing off-chain assets.
A new era of derivatives
Industry officials say the partnership is a natural step for both companies. For BitMEX, reliable, high-frequency data is the technical foundation for its PERP product, which tracks stocks and ETFs around the clock, while for Chainlink, the deal highlights its continued efforts to expand the oracle’s reach beyond crypto assets to tokenized real-world products. Experts saw this development as part of a broader trend, with derivatives platforms increasingly relying on established oracle networks to power RWA (real world assets) markets.
If successful, Equity Perps could provide traders with 24/7 exposure to stock and ETF price movements without owning the underlying stocks, using collateral and settlement mechanisms unique to the cryptocurrency ecosystem. However, the product also raises common questions about market structure and risks. That means things like how index and mark prices are constructed, how funding rates work, and how exchanges handle liquidity and settlement when U.S. stock markets are closed. These operational details are likely to determine whether stock criminals act like fair instruments or create new arbitrage and settlement headaches.
Both BitMEX and Chainlink have built reputations for high-performance infrastructure. BitMEX is a professional derivatives execution and Chainlink is a supply of oracle data used by many DeFi protocols. Data Streams is already running on numerous blockchains, providing feeds for major US stocks and ETFs, so this partnership aims to combine the reliability of that data with BitMEX’s trading rails to offer a new set of products to derivatives traders. Observers will be watching the initial developments closely to see if the theoretical benefits translate into tighter spreads and more predictable funding for traders.
For now, announcements have been short and focused, with social posts indicating product direction rather than full technical whitepapers. Traders and regulators alike will likely want more information about the exact indexes, data sources, and risk controls that BitMEX plans to use before drawing firm conclusions. Still, the partnership is another sign that the lines between traditional finance and crypto derivatives continue to blur as infrastructure providers push to bridge the two worlds.
