Brief
- Real-world assets (RWA) – tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments like company stocks, crude oil and market indices traded as blockchain contracts – accounted for 54% of Hyperliquid’s weekly trading volume from July 13-19, the first time non-crypto assets have dominated the exchange.
- Lorenzo Valente, ARK Invest’s director of digital assets research, said Hyperliquid’s $26 billion in RWA transactions last week exceeded the combined perpetual crypto volume of every other decentralized exchange on Earth.
- South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, a direct rival to Samsung in AI memory production, has driven most of the interest in Hyperliquid’s third-party marketplace platform.
For the first time, traders on Hyperliquid moved more money through stocks and commodities than through crypto. Lorenzo Valente, director of digital assets research at ARK Invest, announced the milestone on Thursday. Challenge“Hyperliquid,” he said, “generated more trading volume from so-called real-world assets, or RWA, than from crypto for the first time in a single week.
RWAs, i.e. tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments like company stocks, crude oil or the S&P 500, converted into blockchain-based contracts that traders can buy and sell 24 hours a day, totaled $25.1 billion between July 13 and 19, or 52% of Hyperliquid’s $48.2 billion in weekly volume, according to data from Blockworks. Valente estimates the latest running figure at $26 billion and 54 percent.
The context makes this figure more difficult to achieve. Perpetual total DEX volume across the entire industry last week was $79 billion. Hyperliquid processes 50 billion dollars. The $26 billion in RWA transactions alone – just stock bets, oil contracts, index plays – was larger than the combined perpetual crypto volume of every other decentralized exchange on the market.
How Stocks Ended Up on a Crypto Exchange
The mechanism behind this is HIP-3, a Hyperliquid framework launched in October 2025 that allows external teams to create their own perpetual markets – contracts that track the price of an asset without an expiration date, allowing traders to bet on its rise or fall with borrowed money – using Hyperliquid’s existing infrastructure. Builders stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, currently worth around $30 million, to access the system.
We are entering a new era for DeFi.
For the first time ever, @HyperliquidX generated more RWA volume than crypto in a single week. RWAs accounted for 54% of total trading volume.
An even more interesting trend: since June, individual stocks have outperformed the indexes and… pic.twitter.com/INbfCwc5pJ
– Lorenzo Valente (@LorenzoARK) July 23, 2026
Since June, individual stocks have outperformed indices and commodities within the HIP-3, with perpetual stocks now accounting for 61% of all RWA trading. The HIP-3 platform has already hosted pre-IPO markets for SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. “RWAs accounted for 54% of total trading volume,” Valente noted.
The most traded stock is SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chipmaker that competes with Samsung in supplying high-bandwidth DRAM and memory for AI systems.
ARK’s interest in Hyperliquide goes back further. In September 2025, CEO Cathie Wood told the Master Investor podcast that the platform “reminds me of Solana in the early days,” adding that Solana had proven its worth and earned its place among the biggest names in crypto. She called Hyperliquid the “new kid on the block” and ARK has not confirmed any positions since.
Today, one of ARK’s analysts raises a more difficult question for the entire industry. “I am no longer convinced that RWA trading will naturally coalesce into the same venue as crypto,” Valente wrote, predicting that dedicated category leaders could emerge within RWA and that one platform’s hold on Bitcoin and Ethereum flows could prove “much less than many people think.”
Traders still focus only on crypto tokens, he added, “focusing on the wrong market.”