Real-world assets outpaced crypto on Hyperliquid for the first time last week, reaching 54% of the exchange’s trading volume. ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente says the shift raises doubts about whether tokenized stocks and crypto will keep trading on the same venues.
Traders on Hyperliquid moved more money through stocks and commodities than through crypto for the first time in a single week. ARK Invest’s director of digital assets research Lorenzo Valente announced the milestone on X Thursday, writing: “We are entering a new era for DeFi.”
Tokenized real-world assets — company shares, crude oil, or the S&P 500 rebuilt as round-the-clock blockchain contracts — are what drove the shift. They 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 running figure at $26 billion and 54%.
The scale sharpens the point. Industry-wide perpetual DEX volume reached $79 billion last week, of which Hyperliquid processed $50 billion. That $26 billion in RWA trading alone topped the combined crypto perpetual volume of every other decentralized exchange, according to Valente.
How stocks landed on a crypto exchange
The mechanism is HIP-3, a framework Hyperliquid launched in October 2025 to let outside teams build markets on its infrastructure. These are perpetual markets — contracts that track an asset’s price with no expiry date. Builders stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, worth roughly $30 million, to access the system.
Since June, single-stock perpetuals have overtaken indices and commodities, now making up 61% of all RWA trading. The platform has already hosted pre-IPO markets for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Its most-traded stock is SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chipmaker that competes with Samsung in supplying chips for AI systems.
ARK’s longer interest
ARK’s attention predates the milestone. In September 2025, CEO Cathie Wood compared Hyperliquid to Solana in its early days on the Master Investor podcast, calling it the new kid on the block, and the firm has not confirmed any position since.
Now one of ARK’s own analysts is pressing a harder question. Valente wrote that he is no longer convinced RWA trading will naturally aggregate on the same venue as crypto, predicting that dedicated category leaders may emerge within the sector. A platform’s grip on Bitcoin and Ethereum flow may prove far less important than many assume, he added. Traders fixed only on crypto tokens, in his view, are watching the wrong market.
Source: Decrypt
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