Optimism CBO makes the case that perp exchanges should own their infrastructure

The perpetual futures market has become one of crypto’s most competitive arenas, with dozens of platforms battling over the same pool of traders. At Cointelegraph’s CONNECT event in Seoul on September 29, Kyle Jenke, Optimism’s Chief Business Officer, offered a pointed thesis on what separates the winners from the rest: owning your infrastructure. Jenke’s argument boils down to a simple idea. Exchanges that build and control their own dedicated chains can fine-tune everything from execution speed to compliance tooling, while those relying on shared or rented infrastructure are stuck working within someone else’s constraints. Why infrastructure ownership matters for perps Perpetual futures, or perps, are derivative contracts that let traders bet on asset prices without expiration dates. They’re wildly popular in crypto because they offer leverage and flexibility, but they also demand serious backend performance. Latency, throughput, and reliable order matching aren’t luxuries for perp platforms. They’re survival requirements. Jenke’s case is that the exchanges seeing the most traction have invested in dedicated infrastructure rather than deploying on general-purpose chains where the...