A New Kind Of Hedging Market, And What It Means For Tech Leaders

InnovationA New Kind Of Hedging Market, And What It Means For Tech LeadersByLihong Wang,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 02, 2026, 09:15am EDTLihong Wang is Co-Founder & CEO at Freeport, building perpetual futures infrastructure onchain. gettyA 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.Where Perp Markets Are HeadingFor 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.​How Does This Affect The Tech Industry​?Here are two quick examples from the tech industry of where this is most promising.Cloud Compu...