Lihong Wang is Co-Founder & CEO at Freeport, building perpetual futures infrastructure onchain.
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A few months ago, I had dinner with the founder of an AI inference company. He had just signed a multiyear deal to reserve thousands of GPUs at a fixed rental price: tens of millions of dollars locked in. He told me he was almost certainly going to be wrong about where GPU prices were heading by month six, and there was no good way to protect himself.
That conversation has stuck with me. As CEO of Freeport, I spend a lot of time watching new financial markets get built, and what's happening right now is something tech leaders in many industries should know about. A new kind of always-on hedging market, known in finance as a "perpetual future" or "perp," is starting to show up around things that used to be impossible to hedge, such as cloud computing and real estate. If your business is exposed to any of these, this matters to you.
For decades, only commodity-heavy industries had real hedging tools. Oil companies could lock in oil prices. Farmers could lock in wheat prices. But most tech businesses just absorbed whatever input-price swings hit them and hoped for the best. That's now changing. The new perp markets work a little differently from the old ones: They never expire, they trade 24/7, and they stay anchored to real prices through small ongoing fees. But the practical benefit is the same. If your business is on the wrong side of a price move, you can now offset it.
Here are two quick examples from the tech industry of where this is most promising.
New markets are starting that let businesses hedge against swings in the rental price of GPUs and memory. Two years ago this didn't exist. If you run an AI infrastructure business, or you buy a lot of inference capacity, this is moving toward an operationally useful market fast.
DRAM and NAND contract prices have moved over 500% over the past year and have created significant cost uncertainty for buyers as producers over- and under-build capacity, and AI demand has only made the cycles sharper. A laptop manufacturer, an automotive supplier and a cloud provider standing up inference capacity all face the same problem: They have a pretty good sense of how much memory they'll consume over the next 12 months, but they have almost no way to lock in the price.
The very largest buyers negotiate long-term contracts directly with Samsung, SK Hynix or Micron, but everyone else is exposed to the market. A perpetual futures contract on a memory-price index can let any buyer, not just the giants, fix their input cost and plan a margin, while the producers could hedge the other side against gluts.
AI data centers are a significant new source of electricity demand in the U.S. and have caused energy prices to skyrocket by over 250% in affected locations. When a hyperscaler drops a new campus into a region, every business on the same grid—the manufacturer, the cold-storage warehouse and the local industrial park—will all see their power costs spike. A perpetual futures contract on a regional power index can create a single continuously traded instrument that lets local businesses hedge cleanly against energy costs induced by a new neighbor or any other factor.
So what should you do? Three things:
1. Find out whether your industry's most important price already has a market like this. The answer is changing every few months, and most CFOs I talk to are six to 12 months behind.
2. If the market exists, run one small position through your finance team: one contract, one quarter. You'll learn more from that than from debating whether to consider it.
3. Build a relationship with the venues forming markets in your industry's underlying prices. These teams need real businesses, not just speculators, using their products, and they'll treat early industry partners as design partners. That conversation is much easier this year than it will be next year.
I've watched enough new markets get built to know that the early companies in any industry that engage with new hedging tools tend to do well, not because the hedge itself makes them money, but because it lets them quote prices and sign contracts their competitors can't match. The first tech leaders in each of these industries to get smart about this trend will have a structural advantage. The ones who wait until it's obvious will miss out.
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