Hyperliquid RWAs Top Crypto in Weekly Volume
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- Hyperliquid saw real-world assets (RWAs) account for 54% of its weekly trading volume during July 13–19, totaling roughly $26 billion — the first time non-crypto assets dominated the exchange.
- ARK Invest's Lorenzo Valente said Hyperliquid's $26 billion in RWA trading alone exceeded the combined crypto perpetual volume of every other decentralized exchange on the market.
- Hyperliquid processed $50 billion of the $79 billion in perpetual DEX volume industry-wide last week, per Blockworks data.
- HIP-3, the framework Hyperliquid launched in October 2025, lets outside teams build perpetual markets by staking 500,000 HYPE tokens (~$30 million) and has already hosted pre-IPO markets for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
- Single-stock perpetuals overtook indices and commodities on HIP-3 since June, now making up 61% of all RWA trading, with SK Hynix — the South Korean memory chipmaker competing with Samsung in AI DRAM and high-bandwidth memory — as the most-traded stock.
- Valente challenged the conventional wisdom, writing that he is "no longer convinced RWA trading will naturally aggregate on the same venue as crypto" and that a platform's grip on Bitcoin and Ethereum flow may prove "far less important than many people assume."
Why it matters: For Hyperliquid, the $26 billion RWA week validates the bet on HIP-3, but Valente's own caveat undercuts the celebratory framing: if RWA traders don't need to route through crypto-native venues, Hyperliquid's dominance over Bitcoin and Ethereum perpetuals becomes a weaker moat for the much larger tokenized-stocks market. Crypto-DEXes have long been assumed to be the natural home for tokenized equities; the data now says that assumption is untested.
