Antoni Kiszka is building a derivatives exchange for everything — starting with meme coins, targeting hydrogen and beyond

Antoni Kiszka is building Perpetual, a derivatives exchange protocol designed to go well beyond crypto. The company is currently live on meme coins, letting traders take leveraged long and short positions, but Kiszka frames that as a testing environment rather than a destination.

The logic is straightforward: meme coin markets are volatile, the participants are aggressive, and running a derivatives protocol through that environment surfaces problems fast. The real ambition is traditional finance.

“We created a new kind of derivative, and we want to use this type of derivative to bring derivatives to assets beyond the top 1,000 that exists now. The inspiration is something that we probably want to have as one of our first assets in traditional finance is hydrogen — there is no hydrogen derivatives anywhere whatsoever.”

Hydrogen is the asset Kiszka flags as a near-term target. There are currently no hydrogen derivatives anywhere, despite hydrogen being a significant input for energy and industry. He argues the problem is structural — production is too geographically dispersed to build a single tradeable index, which makes it effectively invisible to traditional market makers. That same decentralization, he argues, is exactly where a protocol-based exchange has an edge.

On regulatory strategy, Kiszka points to Kalshi as the model. Kalshi's approach, spending years filing letters to the CFTC before doing much else, eventually produced a regulatory position that no competitor has come close to matching. Perpetual wants to follow a similar path.

Kiszka is a Thiel Fellow. Before Perpetual he ran a software house, built a trading terminal for crypto, and sold Minecraft items.

The open question is timing. Meme coin derivatives have a ceiling, and Kiszka acknowledges that market is a fraction of the size of anything that creates genuine economic utility. Getting from crypto-native testing ground to regulated traditional finance instruments involves a regulatory runway that, by Kalshi's own example, can take years.