A new exchange is testing whether the perpetual futures contract, a staple of crypto trading, can be adapted to traditional markets. DeepSigma, a decentralized platform for real-world asset (RWA) perpetuals, has launched a live paper-trading demo spanning 77 markets that include major US equity indexes, sector ETFs, commodities and Treasury yields.
The team behind the project draws on experience at Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, Google and Uber. DeepSigma is built on the Cypherium blockchain, an open Layer 1 network founded by DeepSigma CEO Sky Guo. The platform does not tokenize or take custody of underlying assets; instead, its perpetual contracts track external price data, giving traders long or short exposure without owning or delivering the asset.
Adapting perpetuals to markets that close
Crypto perpetuals trade around the clock on venues that never shut, but real-world assets behave differently. Equities pause overnight and on weekends, commodities can face fragmented price discovery, and liquidity may thin out sharply. DeepSigma says its architecture was designed from the start around those gaps.
The risk framework includes multi-source external pricing, mark-price mechanisms intended to limit short-term manipulation, position and exposure limits, circuit breakers, partial liquidations and an insurance mechanism for stressed conditions. Trading runs on a central limit order book, with a clearing layer handling positions, collateral, margin and settlement.
"The hardest part of bringing real-world assets on-chain isn't creating another market symbol," Guo said. "It's making sure the market still behaves sensibly when the underlying asset is closed, liquidity disappears or an external price moves sharply."
Compliance and privacy by design
DeepSigma is also taking a different approach to identity than fully permissionless venues. The company is developing decentralized identity infrastructure around the principle of proving eligibility rather than identity, using zero-knowledge proofs so participants can show they meet requirements without publishing personal data on-chain. It is working with specialized digital-asset counsel and treating regulatory readiness as a market-entry advantage.
The trading terminal combines paper trading with market data, technical indicators, asset-specific news, portfolio tracking and a leaderboard. An AI Market Analysis Desk can generate potential strategies but operates entirely off-chain, with no authority to execute trades or move user assets.
Leadership and infrastructure
DeepSigma's leadership includes CFO Albert Xu, a former FICC portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs; CTO Chaoran Wang, a former Google and Uber engineer; and Chief Quant Director Jenny Chen, a quantitative macro trader and Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance honoree who most recently worked at Citadel Securities.
Cypherium, the underlying network, holds four granted US patents covering blockchain consensus and related technology. Its architecture combines Proof-of-Work with HotStuff-derived Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus and is designed to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
"DeepSigma brings together two areas that have largely developed separately: the market structure and risk discipline of traditional finance, and the open infrastructure that has made on-chain perpetuals successful," Guo said.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
