Join Delphine Forma, Head of Policy APAC & Europe at Solidus Labs, as she sits down with Alex Tsilipanos, Head of Market Surveillance at Perpetuals.com — a regulated MTF bringing institutional-grade infrastructure to crypto perpetual futures.

They unpack what it really takes to build a market surveillance function from scratch for crypto perps trading — from detecting funding rate manipulation and cross-venues abuse, to combining on-chain and off-chain data into a single surveillance framework. Drawing on years of experience at Interactive Brokers and now at the frontier of crypto derivatives, Alex brings a rare practitioner's perspective on one of compliance's most technically demanding disciplines.

They discuss:

• What it takes to build a market surveillance function from scratch
• Why traditional market surveillance frameworks cannot simply be copied and pasted into crypto — and what can still be carried across
• The unique market abuse risks associated with crypto perps, including funding rate and insurance fund manipulation
• How manipulation of an underlying spot market can be used to profit from a perpetual position elsewhere
• The challenge of detecting cross-venue and cross-product manipulation across fragmented markets
• How to distinguish genuine market activity from deliberate attempts to trigger liquidations
• Why effective crypto surveillance requires combining on-chain activity, off-chain order and trade data, and external market information
• How to design meaningful alerts without creating unmanageable volumes of false positives
• What a strong market abuse investigation looks like and how to build the evidence needed before escalating a case
• How MiCA's market abuse framework interacts with MAR, and whether existing approaches are enough for crypto
• How market surveillance is evolving and the role AI could play in its future