Key facts
- Real-world assets (RWAs) constituted 54% of Hyperliquid's trading volume from July 13-19.
- This is the first time RWAs have surpassed crypto assets in weekly trading volume on the exchange.
- Hyperliquid processed $26 billion in RWA trading, exceeding the combined crypto perpetual volume of all other decentralized exchanges.
- SK Hynix, a memory chipmaker, was the most traded stock on the platform.
- ARK Invest's director of digital assets research, Lorenzo Valente, highlighted this shift as a potential new era for DeFi.
For the first time, trading volume in real-world assets (RWAs) on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid has surpassed that of cryptocurrencies. Between July 13 and July 19, RWAs—which include tokenized stocks, commodities, and indices—accounted for 54% of Hyperliquid's total trading volume, amounting to $26 billion. This figure alone exceeded the combined crypto perpetual volume of all other decentralized exchanges globally.
Lorenzo Valente, director of digital assets research at ARK Invest, announced the milestone, suggesting it heralds a new era for decentralized finance (DeFi). The trend is partly driven by Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, launched in October 2025, which allows external teams to build perpetual markets using the exchange's infrastructure. Builders stake 500,000 HYPE tokens to access this system.
Since June, single stocks have become the dominant RWA category on HIP-3, making up 61% of RWA trading. The South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix has been the most actively traded stock. Valente's analysis suggests that traditional crypto exchanges might not be the natural home for RWA trading, and that a platform's dominance in Bitcoin and Ethereum flows may become less critical than previously assumed.