Greed Is Back on Wall Street. The 24/7 Crypto Floor Just Became the Default.
On 3 June 2026, two signals from opposite ends of finance pointed in the same direction. Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon told the Financial Times that morning that there is "more greed than fear" on Wall Street, with liquidity ready to absorb a coming wave of mega-IPO issuance. Hours later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hyperliquid — a crypto-native perpetual-futures venue — is quietly becoming Wall Street's preferred 24/7 trading floor for derivatives on everything from crude oil to pre-IPO tech giants. Read them together and the picture sharpens: when the Street is in risk-on mode, capital does not wait for the bell.
The convergence is the story. A risk-on Goldman CEO and a quiet default to a crypto-native venue are not two separate dispatches; they are one story told simultaneously from the buy-side desk and the infrastructure layer. The question is no longer whether 24/7, always-on, anything-on-anything derivatives belong to the crypto fringe. The question is whether the rest of the Street has time to catch up.
Solomon's diagnosis
Solomon's "more greed than fear" remark landed on the morning of 3 June 2026, in comments reported by the Financial Times and carried across the morning wires by the Financial News desk. The Goldman chief framed the moment as one of abundant liquidity, with investor appetite running ahead of caution. The setup matters: his words were directed at a calendar stacked with mega-IPO issuance from AI-adjacent companies, the kind of deals that demand a clear read on buyer demand before a price is set.
The diagnosis is bullish but qualified. Solomon has spent the last several quarters warning about complacency, geopolitical risk, and the difficulty of calling a top in a market that keeps re-rating. To call the current state "greed" is to make a stand: there is a bid, and the bid is willing. The risk, by his own framing, is that the bid fades — but for now, the bid is the dominant fact. In a market that lives or dies on secondaries, convertibles, and block trades, the assurance that liquidity is "plenty" is itself a market-moving comment.
The Hyperliquid shift
The same morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hyperliquid is emerging as Wall Street's go-to 24/7 venue for perpetual futures on a widening asset menu — crude oil alongside more exotic references, with pre-IPO tech exposure cited as one of the demand drivers. The phrase "Wall Street's go-to" is the load-bearing one. The audience for a perpetual futures contract on crude oil is not, historically, the Goldman prime brokerage client. The audience has been the offshore retail crypto trader, the basis-trade shop, and the DeFi-native fund. That the same venue is now being called Wall Street's default tells you where the demand has migrated.
Perpetual futures are a contract type native to crypto exchanges — cash-settled, no expiry, funded periodically to track spot. They allow leveraged exposure to anything a venue chooses to list, around the clock, with no settlement window. The traditional futures market in Chicago and London opens and closes. Crypto never does. As the underlying asset list widens — from Bitcoin to crude to pre-IPO equity proxies — the 24/7 venue stops being a curiosity and becomes the most useful piece of infrastructure in the room. The Wall Street Journal's framing matters: an institutional press organ is naming a non-US, non-CFTC-regulated venue as the default for a set of instruments the Street used to source from the CME and ICE.
The structural read
What connects a bullish Goldman CEO to a crypto-native derivatives venue is not ideology. It is the same fact, observed from two positions. Wall Street has more risk appetite than caution. Where appetite is high, capital seeks edge — and edge increasingly lives outside the 9:30-to-4 window. The 24/7 trading day is no longer a crypto-finance eccentricity tolerated by the mainstream; it is the architecture that a risk-on Street reaches for first.
The deeper pattern is the migration of default venues. When oil traders want continuous exposure, they used to call a broker in London or Singapore for an OTC swap. Increasingly, they appear to be clicking a Hyperliquid order book. The same dynamic that brought credit default swaps out of bespoke bilateral trades into standardised contracts two decades ago is repeating in real time, on a venue the institutional press used to treat as exotic. The grammar of "where trades happen" is being rewritten from the bottom of the stack up — a process that has historically taken a decade, and is now compressing into a year.
There is also a Global-South read. The same 24/7 infrastructure that lets a Singapore hedge fund run a perpetual crude position through Asian hours lets a Lagos or Karachi retail trader do the same. As Wall Street arrives at the venue, the venue does not become less accessible to the periphery; it becomes more so, because the liquidity thickens. The winners are not only the buy-side desks that gain extra hours — they are the counterparties who were already on the venue and now find themselves trading against deeper books. The platform that started as a DeFi-native tool is becoming the world's first genuinely continuous derivatives exchange, with all the inclusion and concentration risk that implies.
A third layer sits underneath both. The dollar's role as the settlement currency of crypto perpetuals — even when the underlying asset is crude or a pre-IPO equity proxy — keeps US monetary policy at the centre of a market that the press has spent five years calling "dollar-free." Wall Street arriving at Hyperliquid does not weaken the dollar's plumbing; it deepens it, because the funding leg of every perpetual is still collateralised in stables, and the dominant stable is still dollar-pegged. The City that the wire reporters called greedy is, in this sense, the City that the offshore retail trader has been funding all along.
What remains contested
The bullish narrative is not the only one in the room. Solomon's own framing is hedged: "more greed than fear" is a read, not a guarantee. The mega-IPO pipeline he points to is itself a test — issuance in size will reveal whether the bid is real or a positioning mirage. If the IPOs price cleanly and hold, the greed reading is vindicated. If they break on debut, the call becomes a marker of the top. Goldman has an institutional interest in the bid holding; it is one of the lead left on the deals Solomon is talking about.
Hyperliquid's institutional adoption is similarly unproven in the public record. The Wall Street Journal's characterisation is editorial — the venue is "emerging as" the default, not yet confirmed as such. A venue that handles the bulk of crypto-native perpetual volume is not automatically the venue of choice for an oil major's hedging desk. Compliance, counterparty risk, and the legal status of synthetic crude exposure on a non-CFTC-registered platform remain live questions. The 24/7 story is real. The institutional story is one step ahead of the regulatory one — and in markets, the gap between "emerging as" and "is" has historically been where blowups live.
The other live question is concentration. A market that consolidates its derivatives activity into one or two 24/7 venues is a market with a single point of failure — technical, jurisdictional, or political. The 2022 failure of FTX taught the Street what a venue collapse looks like at retail scale. The question for 2026 is whether the institutional move to Hyperliquid-style infrastructure comes with the risk-engineering, segregation, and disclosure regime that the previous cycle lacked. There is no public evidence yet that it does.
Stakes
If Solomon is right, the next twelve months are a volume story: more issuance, more leverage, more 24/7 turnover, more venues competing for the new default. The winners are the platforms that built the rails first, the issuers that bring paper to a receptive bid, and the asset managers positioned for the issuance wave. The losers are the venues that fail to extend hours, the regulators that fail to extend frameworks, and the desks that mistake the current greed for permanence.
The cleaner read is that the perimeter of what counts as a "venue" has moved. The bell still rings at 9:30 in New York. The 24/7 book never closes. When the Street is greedy, capital follows the open door — and right now, the open door leads to a venue that did not exist in its current form five years ago.
Desk note: Monexus ran this as a single piece because the two wires — Solomon's FT remarks and the WSJ Hyperliquid read — landed in the same morning window. The institutional press covered them as separate stories; this publication read them as one market-state signal.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/cointelegraph
- https://t.me/cointelegraph
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Solomon_(businessman)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_futures
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTX