Glassnode and Fasanara Digital have released their Q4 2026 Digital Asset Report. It examines how digital asset market structure is changing as the fourth quarter gets underway.
The headline finding: traditional finance is increasingly using crypto derivatives. Perpetual contracts tied to stocks, gold and oil are growing on major trading venues.
What the report covers
The joint report spans four areas: liquidity, derivatives, tokenized assets and institutional flows. Its stated audience is allocators, meaning the people who decide where large pools of capital go.
The derivatives finding deserves the most attention. Perpetual futures, or “perps,” are a crypto-native invention. They work like a standard futures contract with no expiration date.
Instead of settling on a fixed day, perps use periodic funding payments between longs and shorts. Those payments keep the contract price close to the underlying asset.
Now, according to the report, venues are listing perps on equities, gold and oil, and that activity is growing.
Who is behind the numbers
Glassnode is an on-chain analytics firm. It reads data directly from public blockchains to track how coins move, who holds them and how long they sit still.
Fasanara Digital was founded in 2018. It was one of the first institutional market-neutral funds focused on digital assets, and it has been named Market Neutral Fund of the Year.
Market-neutral means the fund aims to make money regardless of whether prices go up or down. Fasanara uses a quantitative approach designed to keep its returns weakly correlated with broader market moves.
This is not the pair’s first collaboration. Previous Fasanara-Glassnode reports tallied more than $732 billion in new capital flowing into Bitcoin during prior cycles.
Earlier joint work also tracked real-world asset tokenization growing from $7 billion to $24 billion year-over-year.
Where the market stands
The report lands while Bitcoin is in recovery mode. A separate Glassnode Q4 2026 report, produced with Coinbase Institutional, analyzed that rebound and noted Bitcoin traded near $82,000 in mid-October 2026.
The research also frames the derivatives trend as structural rather than speculative. The argument is that institutions are folding these instruments into regular investment strategies, not just dabbling for a quarter.
What this means for investors and venues
For exchanges, the shift raises the competitive stakes. Venues that list stock, gold and oil perps are no longer competing only with each other. They are effectively competing with traditional futures exchanges and brokerages for the same trader.
The tokenization thread ties these pieces together. Real-world asset tokenization grew from $7 billion to $24 billion year-over-year in earlier Fasanara-Glassnode data. Perpetuals on stocks and commodities extend the same idea from ownership to trading.
There are risks worth watching. Perps are leveraged instruments, and leverage tends to amplify both gains and liquidations during sharp moves. Bringing traditional assets onto these rails means traditional asset traders also inherit crypto’s 24/7, high-leverage dynamics.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.