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1. Decrypt adds Phoenix perps to its news platform
On November 11, 2026, crypto media company Decrypt began offering perpetual futures trading on its own platform through Phoenix, a fully onchain perpetuals exchange built on Solana (SOL). The company says it is the first news publisher to do so, giving readers access to more than 100 Phoenix perps markets covering crypto, U.S. stocks, gold and pre-IPO companies without leaving the site.
The integration means a reader who has just finished a story about a market-moving event can open a long or short position on the related asset in the same place. Decrypt says users will not need to switch apps, connect an outside wallet or shuttle funds between separate platforms to do so.
Perpetual futures now sit alongside several other financial features Decrypt has added over recent months, including prediction markets, token swaps and a yield product called Earn. Together they form what the company calls its Information Exchange, a model that ties reporting and market data directly to the ability to act on them.
2. Why a publisher wants a trading desk
For most of the history of financial journalism, the reporting and the means of trading on it have lived in different places. A reader learns about an earnings surprise, a regulatory ruling or a protocol upgrade from a publication, then leaves to place an order with a broker or an exchange. Decrypt is betting that this separation is no longer necessary.
Ilan Hazan, Decrypt's co-founder and chief operating officer, framed the move in economic terms. He argued that publishers are paid for the advertising impressions their stories generate, while the trades those stories inspire produce revenue for other businesses. In his view, that leaves news organizations with only a thin slice of the economic activity their journalism sets in motion.
Hazan said the company is folding media and financial products together so that readers can go from understanding a development to taking a position on it without leaving the platform. The pitch is that the step between information and action, which normally involves several apps and transfers, can be reduced to a few taps.
The logic reflects a broader pressure on digital media. Advertising rates are volatile, search and social referrals are unpredictable, and many outlets have looked for revenue streams that depend less on page views. By hosting trading activity, a publisher can potentially earn from the transactions themselves rather than only from the attention that precedes them.
3. What Phoenix says it brings
Kabir Sethi, head of business development at Phoenix, described the partnership as a way to close the gap between reading news and acting on it. He pointed to the more than 100 Phoenix perps markets now built into Decrypt as the core of that offering.
Phoenix runs markets around the clock in crypto assets, U.S. equities, gold and companies that have not yet gone public. According to the exchange's own website, it offers leverage of up to 40 times and low trading fees. Because the venue is onchain, trades settle on the Solana blockchain rather than inside the private books of a centralized operator.
The exchange is developed by Ellipsis Labs, a team that builds exclusively on Solana. Its chief executive, Eugene Chen, has publicly said that perpetual futures have "crazy product market fit," a reference to how quickly traders have embraced the instrument across crypto markets.
Speaking on the Lightspeed podcast earlier this year, Chen described perpetual futures exchanges as businesses that generate substantial revenue. He also explained how Phoenix handles execution: each trade is routed at the moment it is placed, with the order split between the exchange's own order book and outside market makers in order to find the best available price for the trader.
4. What are perpetual futures?
Perpetual futures are derivatives contracts that let traders bet on whether an asset's price will rise or fall, and unlike traditional futures they have no expiry date. A position can be held for as long as the trader keeps enough collateral in the account to support it.
Most perps trading uses leverage, which allows a trader to control a position larger than the cash they put down. That magnifies outcomes in both directions. A modest price move in the trader's favor can produce a large percentage gain, but a modest move against them can wipe out the posted collateral just as quickly. When losses eat through the margin, the position is liquidated automatically, often within moments during fast markets.
Perps were popularized by crypto exchanges and have become the most heavily traded product in digital asset markets, in large part because they allow continuous exposure without the need to roll contracts from one expiry to the next. Their spread to tokenized stocks and commodities on venues like Phoenix extends that structure to traditional assets, with trading available at hours when conventional stock exchanges are closed.
Decrypt itself attaches a warning to the feature: perps are leveraged products that carry a high risk of loss, and availability differs from one region to another. Readers in some jurisdictions will not be able to use the markets at all.
5. One account for every market
Trading on Decrypt runs through the Decrypt Money Account, a self-custodial account on Solana. Self-custodial means the user, not the publisher, controls the funds. The company says the account removes several of the usual hurdles of onchain finance: there is no seed phrase to write down, no gas fee to manage and no need to bridge assets from one blockchain to another.
A single balance in that account now funds every financial feature on the platform. It covers Decrypt Predict, the company's prediction markets product; token swaps powered by the Solana aggregator Jupiter; the Earn yield product; and, as of this launch, perpetual futures. Decrypt has also added confidential transfers using technology from Helius, a Solana infrastructure company.
The company offered two examples of how it expects readers to use the combination. Someone reading about a listed company's quarterly results could trade that company's stock immediately after the news breaks. Someone following a breaking story about Bitcoin (BTC) could take a long or short position on it in real time, whatever the hour.
Consolidating these products behind one balance is central to the idea. Moving money between a news app, a wallet, an exchange and a prediction market typically involves multiple transfers, fees and waiting periods. By keeping everything within a single account, Decrypt hopes to make acting on information about as quick as reading it.
6. The Information Exchange strategy
Decrypt announced its Information Exchange in September. The company describes it as a new model for financial media that combines news, intelligence, market data, probabilities and direct participation in markets in a single destination.
Each component has been added in stages. Prediction markets let readers put money behind their view of how an event will unfold. Swaps let them exchange one token for another. Earn offers yield on idle balances. Perps, the newest addition, open the door to leveraged directional bets on a wide range of assets, including ones far outside the crypto world.
The approach effectively turns a publication into a lightweight financial platform with an editorial front end. Decrypt's tagline for the launch captures the ambition: news moves markets, and readers can now move with it from the same screen.
That positioning puts the company at the intersection of two industries that have traditionally kept their distance. Financial journalism has long relied on separation from trading to protect the credibility of its reporting, while trading venues have relied on outside media to drive interest. Merging the two raises new questions about how a publisher presents market-moving stories when it also earns from the trading activity those stories may encourage.
7. How the perp DEX model fits Solana
Phoenix belongs to a fast-growing category of decentralized perpetuals exchanges, often called perp DEXs. Instead of holding customer funds and matching orders on private servers, these venues run their trading logic on a public blockchain, where positions, collateral and settlement are visible onchain.
Solana has become a favored home for such venues because its high throughput and low transaction costs make it practical to run an order book onchain. Frequent order updates and cancellations, which would be prohibitively expensive on slower networks, become affordable enough to support active trading.
For Decrypt, building on that infrastructure means it does not need to operate an exchange itself. The publisher supplies the audience, the account and the interface, while Phoenix supplies the markets, the pricing and the execution. That division of labor is what allows a media company to offer more than 100 derivatives markets without building a trading engine from scratch.
8. What comes next
Decrypt has presented perpetual futures as the latest piece of the Information Exchange rather than the final one, and the company continues to add features to the Decrypt Money Account. How quickly readers adopt leveraged trading inside a news product will be the first real test of whether the model can change how a publisher earns money.
Regional availability will also shape the rollout. Because perps are restricted or prohibited for retail users in a number of jurisdictions, the feature will not reach every reader, and Decrypt has flagged that access differs by location.
For now, the launch marks a notable experiment: a news site that no longer simply reports on market moves but gives its audience the tools to trade them as they happen.