Five memory names are 57% of crypto's equity-perp volume
Sandisk, Micron, the DRAM ETF, and the Seoul listings of SK Hynix and Samsung took over crypto's perp tape from SpaceX. Then a record Nasdaq listing gave SK Hynix a second price.
Sandisk, Micron, the DRAM ETF, and the Seoul listings of SK Hynix and Samsung took over crypto's perp tape from SpaceX. Then a record Nasdaq listing gave SK Hynix a second price.
Five memory names traded $49.7 billion in perpetuals over the seven days to July 10, 57% of all stock and ETF perp volume on the exchanges we track, up from 37% a month earlier. The most-traded stock on crypto exchanges is Sandisk. SpaceX, the name that owned this tape after its June debut, was out-traded by the three biggest memory names five to one. Into the middle of this, SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion on Nasdaq in the largest ADR offering ever, and the company that crypto's busiest stock contracts reference now trades at two prices.
The five: Sandisk, Micron, the Roundhill Memory
ETF (DRAM), and the Seoul listings of
SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. The
denominator is every stock and ETF perpetual on the exchanges we track, $86.6
billion of it in the seven days to July 10.
Sandisk sets the scale. The NAND flash maker's perpetuals cleared $17.5 billion in the seven days, more than any stock on the exchanges we track, and the ramp is sustained rather than a spike: weekly volume went from $2.8 billion in late May to $16.8 billion in the first five days of this week, a 6x climb over six weeks. Micron added $11.5 billion. The name they displaced is SpaceX. Crypto's hottest stock trade of June still did $8.5 billion across ten venues, more than any other stock outside the group, and in mid-June it was out-trading all five memory names combined. Since June 23 the memory group has out-traded SpaceX every day, and by seven times on July 9.
Crypto exchanges were trading SK Hynix long before Nasdaq could. Hyperliquid's Seoul-referenced contract has printed volume since April, and by early July seven venues were quoting the Korean stock around the clock, dollar-priced off the Korea Exchange listing. Holding a long was expensive: on July 7 the Bitget contract's funding annualized to 548%.
Then the perps printed their biggest day before the shares ever touched Nasdaq. On July 8 the Seoul-referenced contracts cleared $3.79 billion across seven venues, their biggest day on record, and still only the number-two equity perp of that day: Sandisk did $3.82 billion. On July 9 SK Hynix priced 177.9 million ADRs at $149, raising $26.5 billion in the largest ADR offering on record and the largest US listing by a foreign company. The books closed more than seven times oversubscribed under BofA, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan. Among 2026 US IPOs it still ranks second: SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in June. The new ADRs represent 17.79 million newly issued shares, about 2.5% of the company, sold in part on the argument that a US line would close the valuation gap with Micron.
The debut delivered. Trading when-issued as SKHYV on July 10, the ADRs
opened at $170 and closed at $168.01,
12.8% over the offer price; the line
switches to the permanent ticker SKHY on Monday, July 13.
The perps ran hotter still: Binance's Seoul-referenced contract set its own
single-venue record of $2.52 billion on listing day.
The arithmetic of the two lines is fixed by the deal: 10 ADRs represent one Seoul-listed common share, so $149 per ADR is $1,490 per share. Everything above that arithmetic is market.
The listing split crypto's contracts in two. The seven Seoul-referenced perps
kept their reference. Alongside them, a parallel ADR-referenced family went
live before the ADR itself existed: Bitget
published SKHYUSDT on July 3
with the deal's own terms in the contract spec, one week before the debut;
Gate and Hyperliquid followed, and the three ADR perps cleared about $400
million in the 24 hours around the debut, $317 million of it on Hyperliquid.
The token issuers moved on the same schedule: Kraken lists an xStock
(SKHYx) whose issuer Backed already records the when-issued line as the
token's underlying, and Bitget lists a Reality token (RSKHYUSDT) backed by
ADRs at a US broker-dealer.
The two families now price the same company differently. At Friday's closes the gap was 16.5%: $168.01 × 10 × 1,511 won per dollar values a Seoul share at about 2,539,000 won, against a 2,180,000-won close in Seoul. Cash markets then shut for the weekend. Crypto's books stayed open, and the gap is sitting in their weekend marks almost unchanged.
| Reference | Contract | Price | Per Seoul share | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seoul (000660) | Binance SKHYNIXUSDT | $1,476.25 | $1,476.25 | baseline |
| Seoul (000660) | Hyperliquid xyz:SKHX | $1,469.60 | $1,469.60 | -0.5% |
| Seoul (000660) | OKX · Bybit · Bitget | $1,473.87–1,478.99 | same | -0.2% to +0.2% |
| Seoul (000660) | Gate SKHYNIX_USDT | $1,507.30 | $1,507.30 | +2.1% |
| Nasdaq ADR | Bitget SKHYUSDT perp | $172.35 | $1,723.50 | +16.7% |
| Nasdaq ADR | Hyperliquid xyz:SKHY | $172.41 | $1,724.10 | +16.8% |
| Nasdaq ADR | Gate SKHY_USDT | $172.58 | $1,725.80 | +16.9% |
| Nasdaq ADR | Kraken SKHYx token | $171.97 | $1,719.70 | +16.5% |
| Nasdaq ADR | Bitget RSKHYUSDT token | $172.10 | $1,721.00 | +16.6% |
Snapshot July 11, 01:08 UTC, with both cash markets closed; premiums measured against the Binance contract. The two families agree internally to within a fraction of a percent and disagree with each other by 16.5% to 16.9%. Funding shows who is positioned for the gap to close: longs on Bybit's Seoul contract were paying 57% annualized while shorts on Bitget's ADR contract were paying 12%, the carry structure of a market long Seoul and short the ADR.
The gap is tradeable in the cash markets too. UBS told clients to buy the ADR against the Seoul shares. ADRs are cancellable into Seoul-listed stock, and the 17.79 million new shares join the Seoul line on July 29. Underneath it sits a plumbing question: the Korea Exchange trades six and a half hours a day, the perps referencing it trade 168 hours a week, and outside those hours the Seoul contracts mark from each other's futures prices. The ADR line adds the first extra hours of exchange prints this name has ever had. Seoul reopens Monday morning, the ADR goes regular-way the same day, and the premium takes its first two-sided test.
The volume sits on top of a week of memory-demand headlines. Micron reported $41.5 billion in quarterly revenue and guided the current quarter to about $50 billion, with its chief executive saying supply shortages will take considerable time to improve. Samsung flagged a roughly 19-fold jump in quarterly profit on AI memory demand, and its shares fell anyway on concern the boom may stall. The buyers kept building: Meta broke ground on a 1-gigawatt data center in Alberta, and Bloomberg counted about $350 billion of debt taken on by five big tech companies for AI data-center spending.
The stocks did the opposite. On July 2 Samsung and SK Hynix fell as much as 9% and 15% in a day, and by July 8 the KOSPI had dropped 20% from its June record close, with Samsung and SK Hynix making up about half its weight. The perp volume above is what that collision looks like on crypto exchanges: record demand headlines, a bear-market drawdown in the same names, and $49.7 billion of leveraged two-way flow in a week.
Crypto's equity-perp market runs its own trade, centered on the memory cycle rather than the US mega-cap names, and its busiest contracts settle against reference markets that are closed for most of the crypto week. The SK Hynix ADR gave one of those names a second, dollar-native reference for the first time, and the market's first week with it produced a split book: the Seoul contracts kept eight times the open interest, the ADR contracts took $400 million of debut-day flow, and a 16.5% gap sat between them all weekend.
Get Real Stocks tracks both lines from here. We measure every SK Hynix listing, perp, token, and brokered share, across the two references, so you can see which price you are actually trading. The live pages carry volume, open interest, and funding as Monday answers the premium: SK Hynix (Nasdaq ADR) and SK Hynix.