For the first time in Hyperliquid’s history, real-world assets overtook crypto in weekly trading volume, a milestone that ARK Invest’s director of digital assets research Lorenzo Valente described on X as the dawn of ‘a new era for DeFi.’
Tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments, including company shares, crude oil, and the S&P 500, converted into blockchain-based perpetual contracts, generated $25.1 billion in volume during the week of July 13 to 19, according to Blockworks data. That figure represents 52% of Hyperliquid’s $48.2 billion in total weekly volume. Valente’s own running tally placed the RWA figure at $26 billion and 54%.
A Number That Grows in Context
Total perpetual DEX volume across the entire industry last week reached $79 billion. Hyperliquid alone processed $50 billion of that sum. The $26 billion attributable to RWA trading, covering stock bets, oil contracts, and index plays, exceeded the combined crypto perpetual volume of every other decentralized exchange operating in the market.
How Stocks Arrived on a Crypto Exchange
The vehicle is HIP-3, a framework Hyperliquid launched in October 2025 that allows outside teams to build perpetual markets using Hyperliquid’s existing infrastructure. These contracts track an asset’s price with no expiry date, letting traders take leveraged long or short positions. To access the system, builders must stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, currently worth roughly $30 million.
Since June, individual stocks have overtaken indices and commodities within HIP-3. Single-stock perpetuals now account for 61% of all RWA trading on the platform. The HIP-3 marketplace has already hosted pre-IPO markets for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The most actively traded stock on the platform is SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chipmaker that competes directly with Samsung in supplying DRAM and high-bandwidth memory for AI systems.
ARK’s Evolving View
ARK Invest’s interest in Hyperliquid predates this milestone. In September 2025, CEO Cathie Wood told the Master Investor podcast that the platform ‘reminds me of Solana in the earlier days,’ and called Hyperliquid ‘the new kid on the block.’ ARK has not confirmed any investment position in the exchange.
Now Valente is pressing a sharper question. ‘I’m no longer convinced RWA trading will naturally aggregate on the same venue as crypto,’ he wrote, predicting that dedicated category leaders may emerge within RWA and that a platform’s grip on Bitcoin and Ethereum flow may prove ‘far less important than many people assume.’ Traders focused only on crypto tokens, he added, ‘are focusing on the wrong market.’
