Optimism CBO makes the case that perp exchanges should own their infrastructure

The perpetual futures market has become one of crypto’s most competitive arenas, with dozens of platforms battling over the same pool of traders. At Cointelegraph’s CONNECT event in Seoul on September 29, Kyle Jenke, Optimism’s Chief Business Officer, offered a pointed thesis on what separates the winners from the rest: owning your infrastructure.

Jenke’s argument boils down to a simple idea. Exchanges that build and control their own dedicated chains can fine-tune everything from execution speed to compliance tooling, while those relying on shared or rented infrastructure are stuck working within someone else’s constraints.

Why infrastructure ownership matters for perps

Perpetual futures, or perps, are derivative contracts that let traders bet on asset prices without expiration dates. They’re wildly popular in crypto because they offer leverage and flexibility, but they also demand serious backend performance. Latency, throughput, and reliable order matching aren’t luxuries for perp platforms. They’re survival requirements.

Jenke’s case is that the exchanges seeing the most traction have invested in dedicated infrastructure rather than deploying on general-purpose chains where they compete for block space with NFT mints, memecoins, and everything else. This is where Optimism’s OP Stack comes in, a modular framework that lets organizations spin up their own Layer 2 chains on Ethereum.

Kraken’s Ink chain serves as perhaps the clearest example of this thesis in action. Built on OP Stack, Ink has introduced native perps products and experienced rapid growth in total value locked. By running its own chain, Kraken can prioritize the transaction types and execution guarantees that matter most to derivatives traders without worrying about congestion from unrelated activity.

Dedicated infrastructure also gives exchanges granular control over compliance parameters. An exchange running its own chain can implement KYC gates, transaction monitoring, and jurisdiction-specific rules at the protocol level rather than bolting them on as afterthoughts.

Optimism’s deepening roots in South Korea

Jenke’s appearance at CONNECT wasn’t a one-off. He also spoke at Ethereum Korea One the day before, on September 28, underscoring Optimism’s focused push into the South Korean market.

Upbit, South Korea’s dominant crypto exchange, announced its GIWA Chain in May 2026 as the first Self-Managed OP Enterprise deployment. In July, Optimism established a proof of concept for a Korean won stablecoin with Toss, one of the country’s most popular fintech platforms. That same month, DB Securities partnered with Optimism to explore real-world asset tokenization and security token offerings. Then in September, KB Securities, one of Korea’s largest brokerages, launched tokenized products through an Optimism partnership.

The competitive landscape shifts

When an exchange controls its own block production, it can guarantee execution speeds and transaction ordering in ways that are impossible on shared infrastructure. For high-frequency and algorithmic traders, that kind of reliability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the reason they choose one platform over another.

For the South Korean market specifically, Korea Blockchain Week, which hosted the CONNECT event, has become one of Asia’s premier crypto gatherings. Liquidity depth, regulatory compliance, and execution quality dominated the discussion, topics that map directly onto the infrastructure-ownership thesis.