RWA perps will outpace tokenization

Tokenization has gotten nods of approval from the Larry Finks of the world. It's top of mind for every large financial institution. Blackrock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton are just some of the many that have tokenized their assets. Over $34 billion worth of assets have already been tokenized and that's excluding the $300 billion in tokenized dollars. But there is one other mechanism that's scaling faster and I believe to be more impactful: the perpification of real world assets, or RWAs.

RWA perps hit $347 billion in volume in May, a 1,472x increase from the $230 million traded at the start of 2025. Daily open interest on DEXs alone hit a new highs of $4.5 billion in July. By the end of May, exchanges facilitated $1.32 trillion in volume, 13x what we saw in all of 2025.

Markets should be 24/7

Part of their rapid ascent is tied to crypto traders seeking exposure to RWAs like commodities and AI equities. The other factor is that perps are a better product (in many cases) than their TradFi alternatives such as futures for commodities and options for equities.

Traders have no way to react to events after markets close on TradFi venues. Perps on the other hand run 24/7. The Iran conflict was reflected in oil perps on Hyperliquid before CME reopened. Perps offer a continuously running, efficient market in a simple interface. Futures and options come with expiry dates, complicated greeks and interfaces. Perps remove all of that while keeping the speculative upside potential intact.

Martin Lee is Market Insights Lead of DWF Labs, one of the most active market makers and investors in digital assets.

Derivatives always outgrow spot

Derivatives volumes always outgrow their underlying spot market. It's what we see in equities, commodities and crypto. RWAs are following the same trend. Equity perp volume on Hyperliquid ran 13-20x tokenized equity spot volume between March and May 2026.

You could argue that the number of traders matter more, a metric that spot usually wins out across most markets (except commodities). Looking into the numbers, tokenized equities have the bigger base: 180,845 wallets against 24,378 for equity perps. But perp holders are compounding at roughly 33% a month against spot's 17%. Even in the domain where spot dominates, perps are rapidly closing the gap.

Perps innovate faster

The biggest factor driving the acceleration is the rapid rate of experimentation that RWA perps are able to have. Launching tokenized assets takes much longer and is more legally complex than launching a new perp market. The ease of launching perp markets creates opportunities for novel synthetic markets to be spun up. Markets that unlock fresh opportunities that didn't exist before. A true 0 to 1 moment.

Pre-IPO markets are the clearest example of that. Retail gets access to the hottest private companies for the first time. Institutions get better price discovery on private companies. When Cerebras listed on Nasdaq in May, Hyperliquid's pre-IPO perp had priced it at $354, within roughly 1% of the $350 it opened at --- far more accurate than the $185 IPO price set the night before.

Perps will dominate RWAs

RWA perps started the year at just 1.3% of onchain perp volume. They now make up 31%. It's clear that RWAs are consuming perps, but we're more excited about how perps are consuming RWAs.

Crypto native platforms will always be more agile than large, regulated incumbents. The onchain products that reach escape velocity get adopted upstream. Robinhood is already offering RWA perps to European customers. Once that takes off, other retail brokerages will start to follow. It's not far-fetched to see perps become the primary way the masses trade every asset class, not just crypto.

Tokenization was crypto's first big export to TradFi. Perps are next.