RWA Perpetuals Are Poised to Outpace Tokenization as Crypto's Next Major Export to TradFi

Tokenization earned endorsements from figures like Larry Fink and sits high on the agenda of nearly every major financial institution. BlackRock, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton are among the many firms that have tokenized their assets. Over $34 billion in assets have already been tokenized, excluding roughly $300 billion in tokenized dollars. Yet another mechanism is scaling even faster and may prove more impactful: the perpetualization of real-world assets, or RWAs.

Perpetual swaps — derivative contracts with no expiry date that allow leveraged exposure to an asset's price without holding the underlying — were first introduced by crypto exchange BitMEX in 2016. They became the dominant derivative instrument in crypto markets within a few years. Now they are being applied to stocks, commodities, and other traditional instruments.

RWA perpetual swaps reached $347 billion in volume in May, a 1,472x increase from the $230 million traded at the start of 2025. Daily open interest on decentralized exchanges alone hit a new high of $4.5 billion in July. By the end of May, exchanges had facilitated $1.32 trillion in volume — 13x the total recorded across all of 2025.

Markets Should Be 24/7

Part of this rapid growth stems from crypto traders seeking exposure to RWAs such as commodities and AI equities. The other driver is that perpetuals, in many cases, represent a superior product compared with their TradFi alternatives — futures for commodities and options for equities.

Traders using traditional venues have no way to react to events after markets close. Perpetuals, by contrast, operate around the clock. During the Iran conflict, price movements were reflected in oil perps on Hyperliquid — a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for onchain perpetuals trading — before the CME reopened. Perpetuals provide a continuously running, efficient market through a simple interface. Futures and options carry expiry dates, complex Greeks, and steep learning curves. Perpetuals strip away that complexity while preserving speculative upside.

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

Derivatives Always Outgrow Spot

Derivatives volumes consistently outpace their underlying spot markets — a pattern visible across equities, commodities, and crypto. The global OTC derivatives market alone exceeds $700 trillion in notional outstanding, according to the Bank for International Settlements, dwarfing the spot markets it references. RWAs are following the same trajectory. Equity perp volume on Hyperliquid ran 13–20x tokenized equity spot volume between March and May 2026.

One could argue that the number of traders matters more, a metric where spot typically leads across most markets, with commodities as the exception. The numbers show that tokenized equities still have the larger base: 180,845 wallets versus 24,378 for equity perps. However, perp holders are compounding at roughly 33% per month, compared with spot's 17%. Even in the domain where spot dominates, perpetuals are rapidly closing the gap.

Perpetuals Innovate Faster

The most significant factor behind this acceleration is the pace of experimentation that RWA perps enable. Launching tokenized assets is a longer, more legally complex process than opening a new perp market. The ease of deploying perp markets creates openings for novel synthetic instruments — markets that unlock opportunities that simply did not exist before. It represents a genuine 0-to-1 moment.

Pre-IPO markets offer the clearest illustration. Retail investors gain access to the most sought-after private companies for the first time. Institutions obtain better price discovery on those companies. When Cerebras listed on Nasdaq in May, Hyperliquid's pre-IPO perp had priced it at $354 — within roughly 1% of the $350 opening price, and far more accurate than the $185 IPO price set the night before.

Perpetuals Will Dominate RWAs

RWA perps began the year at just 1.3% of onchain perp volume. They now account for 31%. While it is clear that RWAs are consuming perps, the more compelling trend is how perps are consuming RWAs.

Crypto-native platforms will always be more agile than large, regulated incumbents. Onchain products that reach escape velocity get adopted upstream. Robinhood is already offering RWA perps to European customers through a Lithuanian-entity structure — a region where the EU's MiCA framework provides clearer rules for crypto-asset services than the U.S., where the CFTC and SEC have taken a more restrictive posture toward crypto derivatives. Once that gains traction, other retail brokerages are likely to follow. It is not far-fetched to envision perpetuals becoming the primary vehicle through which the general public trades every asset class — not just crypto.

Tokenization was crypto's first major export to TradFi. Perpetuals are next.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.