# About this desk

Cross-Asset Desk Research; Updated 24 September 2026

Cross-Asset Desk is the research team behind gerhardandlinger.net. Its subject is the perpetual contract
that points at something other than a coin — gold, silver, crude oil, a currency pair, a listed share, an
index proxy — settled against stablecoin collateral on a venue that also runs crypto markets. For every
venue on these pages the desk reads the trading terms, writes down what is listed and when those markets
are open, and then measures the one market all of them have in common.

## 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](/method), 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.

Weights: What one account reaches 32 · Cost of getting in and out 28 · Custody of the margin 18 · How the venue has held up 12 · The book behind the quote 10, on a scale of 100. Version 1.1, fixed 23 September 2026 and unchanged since.

— Cross-Asset Desk Research. Edition of 24 September 2026.

This desk is paid to publish, and a venue covered here may be the party that paid.