About this desk

Who pays, and what the money does not buy

These pages are commissioned. A venue written up here may be the party that paid for the write-up, and Cross-Asset Desk puts no distance between itself and that arrangement — a reader is owed the fact at the head of the page, not in grey type beneath somebody else's table.

The money buys two things: that these pages exist, and that a venue is among the ones read. It buys no position in a table, no fraction of a score, no drawback quietly left out and no figure that went unchecked. Order on this domain falls out of the weights published on how we rate, fixed on 23 September 2026 before a venue was read against them. Every venue on every page here, the one standing first included, carries at least two shortcomings taken from its own papers, and nobody is quoted saying anything they have not published themselves.

A venue's own documents, read in order

Markets, asset classes, trading hours, fees and custody terms all come from the venue's own documentation and trading terms, and each fact carries the date it was read beside it. Hours are quoted rather than inferred: where a venue documents none, the tables say so instead of assuming a market runs around the clock, because an assumed session is the fastest way to be wrong about a commodity. Where a marketing page and the trading terms tell different stories, the terms are what gets printed.

Which venues appear on a page is decided by what the page is about — that it lists a gold market, say. A page condition of that kind changes the field on show and never touches a weight.

The one market every venue shares

Nobody publishes order-book depth in a form worth reprinting, so it is measured for these pages instead of requested. The public BTC perpetual book of 28 venues is read every 10 minutes across a single window, 19 September 2026 12:49 UTC to 20 September 2026 17:58 UTC; the tables print the middle reading and the number of readings standing behind it. The window, the rule for counting and the sample size are all on the page precisely so the figure can be argued with rather than taken on trust. Venues without a public book carry no depth figure — not a zero, which would read like a measurement.

Numbers this desk did not gather

Where a figure has to come from somebody else, it comes from whoever publishes it and is labelled that way. Open interest and 24-hour turnover is a return the venue makes about itself, published by CoinMarketCap on 22 September 2026. Audit history comes from CertiK Skynet. Neither is blended with anything measured here, and neither is presented as this desk's own reading.

A perpetual on gold is not gold

There is no metal behind one, no certificate, no dividend on a share perpetual and no vote. What a trader holds is an agreement about a price, margined in a stablecoin, and it can lose the whole of that margin — faster than on a crypto market, because the underlying can close on Friday and reopen on Monday somewhere else entirely. Nothing on this site is investment advice. The desk does not run money, does not place trades and does not tell anyone which venue to open an account on.

The name on this domain

This address previously carried a personal website about the life and career of the businessman whose surname it spells. That site is gone. The desk has no connection to him, to his family, to his company, to the research centre bearing his name or to anyone associated with any of them, and nothing published here speaks on their behalf.

Send us the document that proves it wrong

desk@gerhardandlinger.net reaches the desk. A wrong figure is worth an email, and the useful email has two things in it: which page carries it, and where the right figure is published. Every page is read again once a quarter in any case, and the date on a page moves only when something in the content moved first.