Real-world asset volume tops crypto on Hyperliquid for first time, ARK says

Author: Jose Antonio Lanz Source: Fri, July 24, 2026 at 3:03 PM PDT | 3 min read

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 X Thursday: "We are entering a new era for DeFi."

Hyperliquid, he said, had for the first time generated more trading volume from so-called real-world assets (RWAs) than from crypto in a single week.

RWAs—tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments like company shares, crude oil, or the S&P 500, converted into blockchain-based contracts that traders can buy and sell around the clock—totaled $25.1 billion during July 13–19, or 52% of Hyperliquid's $48.2 billion in weekly volume, per Blockworks data. Valente put the latest running figure at $26 billion and 54%.

The context makes that number land harder:

• Total perpetual DEX volume across the industry last week was $79 billion.
• Hyperliquid processed $50 billion of it.
• The $26 billion in RWA trading alone—stock bets, oil contracts, index plays—was larger than the combined crypto perpetual 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 framework Hyperliquid launched in October 2025 that lets outside teams build their own perpetual markets—contracts that track an asset's price with no expiry date, letting traders bet on it going up or down with borrowed money—using Hyperliquid's existing infrastructure. Builders stake 500,000 HYPE tokens (currently worth roughly $30 million) to access the system.

Since June, individual stocks have overtaken indices and commodities inside HIP-3, with single-stock perpetuals now making up 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 DRAM and high-bandwidth memory for AI systems.

ARK's Broader View

ARK's interest in Hyperliquid goes back further. In September 2025, CEO Cathie Wood told the Master Investor podcast that the platform "reminds me of Solana in the earlier days," adding that Solana had proven its worth and earned its place with the biggest names in crypto. She called Hyperliquid "the new kid on the block." ARK has not confirmed any position since.

Now one of ARK's own analysts is raising a harder question for the whole industry.

"I'm no longer convinced RWA trading will naturally aggregate on the same venue as crypto," Valente 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 still focused only on crypto tokens, he added, "are focusing on the wrong market."

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