Revisiting RWA: Nearly 50,000 people's first on-chain transaction was not Bitcoin, but stock indices and crude oil

Author: bonnazhu

I. A Weekend and a Set of Data

On February 28, the U.S. launched airstrikes in Iran.

Since it was the weekend, traditional markets around the world were closed, but @HyperliquidX was open, and a large number of users flocked to on-chain oil trading for the first time. When commodities opened on March 2, Brent crude oil surged, and the RWA trading volume on Hyperliquid saw its first peak.

The crisis did not quickly resolve due to the victory of the assassination operation against Khamenei. As the event continued to unfold, Hyperliquid's RWA trading volume kept breaking records over the next two weeks, peaking on March 10, with the HIP-3 market's Open Interest also surpassing a historic high of $1.3 billion.

Source: https://loris.tools/hip3

All of this is thanks to Hyperliquid's HIP-3:

An upgrade to a protocol that allows anyone to deploy perpetual contract markets without permission.

Yesterday, a research report on Hyperliquid released by @smartestxyz revealed a phenomenon that most people have overlooked: these HIP-3 markets are not just serving crypto users; they may be bringing people who have never interacted with crypto onto the chain.

The report tracked a metric called "Non-Crypto-First Users": users whose first on-chain transaction was an RWA Perp rather than crypto. As of March 2026, this number stood at 49,602. Nearly 50,000 people encountered crypto for the first time, not because of Bitcoin, but because of stock indices, gold, and crude oil.

Breaking it down by specific assets is even more interesting:

Source: https://x.com/smartestxyz/status/2033136128216244560

This list includes not only traditional commodities and blue-chip stocks but also SpaceX with 727 users and OpenAI with 458 users. These two companies are not publicly listed, and there are no traditional channels for retail investors to trade their equity, yet some people's first on-chain transaction was with them, facilitated by @ventuals' products.

Perhaps due to experiencing too many ups and downs in narratives, I have always had a preconceived bias against the RWA narrative that began to emerge in 2018 (when it was still called STO, Security Token Offering): I thought it was an institutional narrative, a distribution of traditional finance to the crypto market, and had nothing to do with us crypto natives. But the story told by this set of data is completely the opposite.

Differentiated assets lead to a differentiated user base.

I forgot who said this after reading it, but I think it is the most accurate summary of the RWA track, making me realize that my past understanding of RWA was wrong, and it allowed me to see that RWA can indeed steal users from TradFi. By providing assets and experiences that traditional finance cannot offer and serving users that traditional finance cannot reach, it truly expands the boundaries of the financial market.

Hyperliquid has rekindled my hope for RWA.

II. Why Traditional Finance Cannot Serve These People

To understand the core value proposition of RWA, one must consider why nearly 50,000 addresses came on-chain to Hyperliquid instead of going to traditional brokerages.

Source: https://x.com/HyperliquidX/status/2031994448444531053?s=20

From my perspective, I believe there are several reasons:

1) Global Access:

For people in places like the U.S. and Europe, where financial infrastructure is well-developed, it is hard to realize how difficult it is for most people in the world to trade U.S. stocks or crude oil. Opening a brokerage account requires KYC, funding, and identity or visa from specific regions, while CFD brokers, as an alternative path, are restricted or have poor reputations in many countries. This is actually the biggest disconnect in the financial world:

What you take for granted as "open the app and place an order" does not exist for most people globally. On Hyperliquid, you can trade simply by connecting your wallet, with no KYC and no nationality restrictions. (Of course, no KYC also means that some people will inevitably use this to conduct anonymous trading and evade taxes; this is not the platform's design intention, but it is indeed one of the objective motivations for use.)

2) Extremely Low Barriers:

Traditional financial instruments usually have a concept of "one contract": a CME WTI crude oil futures contract has a size of 1,000 barrels, which at an oil price of $100 is about $70,000, and even a micro contract requires 100 barrels, roughly $7,000. Futures brokers typically have minimum funding and capital requirements, while on Hyperliquid, you can open a position with just a few dollars.

3) Higher Leverage:

U.S. Regulation T stipulates a maximum of 2x leverage for stock margin trading (overnight positions). Pattern Day Traders can use up to 4x leverage intraday, but only if their account equity is at least $25,000. In other words, you must have $25,000 first to qualify for 4x leverage. On Hyperliquid, RWA Perp can offer 20x leverage without minimum account margin requirements.

4) Exclusive Products:

The permissionless deployment of HIP-3 means anyone can create trading products that do not exist in traditional finance. For example, exposure to private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, which retail investors have no channels to trade in traditional markets, can be accessed here, as HIP-3 Deployers can stake HYPE to launch.

5) 24/7 Experience:

Traditional commodity and stock markets have strict trading hours. Although major exchanges are constantly working to extend trading hours—CME Globex has already extended weekday trading hours to 23 hours (with only 1 hour for maintenance), Nasdaq has submitted a 23/5 proposal to the SEC (adding night trading from 9 PM to 4 AM), and NYSE has received preliminary approval for 22/5—these efforts mostly address weekday issues, leaving weekends as a vacuum.

The weekend of February 28 is the best example: the U.S. airstrikes in Iran caused market sentiment to fluctuate, but traditional exchanges were closed, and you could only wait until Monday to trade crude oil, stock index futures, silver, and gold. However, the RWA Perp deployed on Hyperliquid is truly 24/7, open all year round.

Source: https://hyperscreener.asxn.xyz/hip3markets/markets

Traditional finance currently cannot achieve any of these five things:

• Global access

• Extremely low barriers

• Higher leverage

• Exclusive products

• 24/7 experience

While traditional finance may try to get closer to a few of these in the foreseeable future, meeting all five simultaneously is nearly impossible under the existing regulatory framework and market structure. Therefore, the window for RWA to attract new users may be much longer than many people think.

III. Two Types of Demand for RWA: Trading and Holding

Users flocking to the chain to gain exposure to RWA actually have two different demands:

1) Trading: Traders want leverage, 24/7 access, and low barriers. Most of the 50,000 Non-Crypto-First users should belong to this category, aligning with Hyperliquid's positioning and user profile.

The product form serving this demand is Perp. However, Perp and the contracts for difference (CFDs) offered by traditional CFD brokers (IG, Plus500, CMC Markets) are essentially very similar; both involve cash settlement, have no expiration date, and are derivatives designed to track the price of underlying assets.

Marco Antonio Ribeiro, CTO of @OstiumLabs, once said a very apt phrase:

Source: https://www.ostium.com/blog/ostium-launches-novel-macro-trading-platform-amidst-growth-in-global-events-based-trading

Perp has two fundamental improvements over CFDs:

The first is the funding rate, a periodic fee payment mechanism between long and short positions that automatically generates incentives to bring the price back when the Perp price deviates from the underlying asset. This is the core mechanism that keeps Perp prices aligned with traditional market prices, which CFDs lack. The second is self-custody; your funds are always on-chain, not in the broker's hands. The core issue with CFDs is that the broker is your counterparty; when you profit, they lose, leading to conflicts of interest that result in numerous black brokers manipulating quotes, slippage, and withholding profits.

Ultimately, traders do not care whether they actually hold a barrel of oil or a futures contract; they care about quickly entering and exiting to profit from price differences and volatility, and that they can smoothly withdraw their profits rather than having them withheld by a black broker platform under the guise of regulatory violations. In this regard, on-chain platforms like @HyperliquidX and emerging RWA Perp platforms like @OstiumLabs have a clear advantage.

2) Holding:

But there is also a huge demand gap for those who are not trading but holding. Long-term allocations in U.S. stocks, global indices, or even managing part of it as a pension are needs that many non-U.S. users have, including myself, as I am one of the many users wanting to dollar-cost average into U.S. stocks and AI-related assets.

The product form serving this demand is Tokenized Stock, truly tokenized assets backed by 1:1 real stocks held by custodians. Its price anchoring mechanism is completely different from the funding rate of Perp: it relies on subscriptions and redemptions. When the on-chain price deviates from NAV, arbitrageurs can bring the price back in line by minting (buying the underlying stock → minting tokens to sell) or redeeming (buying tokens → redeeming the underlying stock to sell), following the same logic as ETFs.

For this type of user, the demands are completely different: no need for leverage, no need for constant trading, but a need for real asset backing, compliance guarantees, and the security of being able to hold long-term. At this point, the issuer's reputation and backing become crucial; if a user does not trust a particular issuer and does not believe it will continue to operate, they would rather withdraw their funds and put them in a traditional brokerage to buy stocks, which is complex but reassuring.

This is not currently Hyperliquid's main focus. Hyperliquid is dealing with Synthetic Perp, which is essentially a more trustworthy CFD contract, serving the trader community. The Holder line is more about Tokenized Stock issuers like @OndoFinance and @xStocksFi, who are working in this direction: winning the trust of long-term holders with 1:1 real asset backing, licensed custody, and compliant structures.

Even traditional financial giants are entering the space: ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, recently made a strategic investment in @okx at a valuation of $25 billion, planning to offer tokenized versions of NYSE-listed stocks in the future, clearly serving users who primarily hold long-term, with short-term trading as a secondary focus.

These two lines are rapidly developing, but they also share a structural problem:

Traditional markets are closed on weekends.

IV. The Core Problem to Overcome: Weekend Pricing

Frankly speaking, the infrastructure for RWA is already more developed than many people imagine. Hyperliquid HIP-3 achieved a cumulative trading volume of $110 billion within months, Ondo's Tokenized Stock (Ondo Global Markets) has a TVL close to $700 million, and xStocks has a cumulative trading volume of $3 billion, indicating that demand has been fully validated. Where there is demand, there are market makers; where there are market makers, there is liquidity, and the flywheel can start turning.

However, weekend pricing remains a challenging issue. After all, the price discovery for traditional assets still lies in traditional trading venues, and there is no anchor for weekend pricing, which is a fact that cannot be changed in the short term.

For Perp, lacking an anchor means prices can be manipulated, and market makers face unhedged risks; for Tokenized Stock, without a minting/redemption mechanism, arbitrage cannot occur, and on-chain prices can deviate from NAV in the short term. Of course, the impact on traders and holders is different. For traders, erratic weekend pricing is fatal; leverage amplifies everything, and price deviations can lead to false liquidations or inability to stop losses. But for holders, it is not necessarily a problem if they cannot trade all the time; a lack of liquidity on weekends is acceptable since they do not plan to sell their pension allocations then.

Currently, the industry is divided into two camps in response to this issue:

1) Conservatives: No trading on weekends, accept liquidity vacuum

Those doing RWA Perp, like @OstiumLabs, are taking this route; they cannot place orders when traditional markets are closed, and oracles stop updating. Providers of Tokenized Stock, like @OndoFinance and @xStocksFi, are essentially also conservatives, as minting and redemption only occur during U.S. stock trading hours. Although tokens can be traded on DEXs over the weekend, the official liquidity guarantee is not provided; 24/7 trading does not equal 24/7 accurate pricing.

2) Radicals: Create weekend price discovery themselves

The largest HIP-3 Deployer on Hyperliquid, @tradexyz, is a pioneer of this faction. Its solution is called Discovery Bounds, which is essentially a price limit. In the V1 version, the weekend price boundary is set at ±5% of Friday's closing price, and it is locked if touched. V2 made improvements: if the price continuously hits the upper limit, the system will raise the limit overall, up to two times, expanding the total range to about ±15.8%, but the instantaneous window remains ±5% at any time.

Frankly speaking, price limits are not new to Chinese A-share investors: the main board has ±10%, the Sci-Tech Innovation Board ±20%, and ST stocks ±5%. The 2015 stock market crash proved that price limits also have limitations: many stocks hit the limit down, and you want to sell but cannot. Fortunately, as traditional market trading hours continue to extend, @tradexyz only needs to handle the less than 48-hour vacuum period over the weekend (after Nasdaq's 23/5 implementation, it may even shorten to about 25 hours). After traditional markets open on Monday, external price anchoring resumes, and overall risk can be absorbed by the deep liquidity of traditional markets. Essentially, Trade.xyz acts as a cushion that alleviates risks in advance, allowing traders to gradually hedge and adjust positions over the weekend instead of piling all the pressure on the moment the market opens on Monday, thereby reducing the severity of the opening.

@tradexyz is not the only radical 24/7 faction.

@Dreamcash (strategic investment by Tether in February 2026, USDT0 settlement, launched markets for S&P 500, gold, silver, etc.), @felixprotocol (USDH settlement, also operates DeFi lending protocols and CDP model stablecoins, and collaborates with Ondo to introduce Spot Equities), and @kinetiq_xyz (the first on-chain U.S. Treasury Perp USBOND) are also HIP-3 Deployers that have launched their RWA Perp markets on Hyperliquid, and they have largely adopted the 24/7 market design paradigm pioneered by @tradexyz. This is already the best transitional solution available.

Although there is significant overlap in the assets deployed by these Deployer, interestingly, this does not seem to be internal competition but rather a broker logic: each Deployer has its own front end, its own user community, and its own customer acquisition channels. Their users may not necessarily know about other Deployer, nor will they necessarily trade on the mixed UI of Hyperliquid's main site, and data proves this:

Source: https://x.com/smartestxyz/status/2033136128216244560

Among the nearly 50,000 users who first entered Hyperliquid because of traditional assets, TradeXYZ contributed 92.75% (46,005 people), Ventuals 3.73% (1,851 people), Dreamcash 2.02% (1,000 people), Felix 1.02% (508 people), and Kinetiq 0.48% (238 people). Each HIP-3 Deployer is bringing different profiles of incremental users into the Hyperliquid ecosystem through their respective front ends and customer acquisition channels.

V. Pre-IPO: Something Wall Street Cannot Do

The root of the weekend pricing problem is that on-chain assets rely on external anchoring from traditional markets; when traditional markets close, the anchor is broken. So why not create opportunities for underlying assets that do not exist in traditional markets?

Pre-IPO assets are precisely such opportunities.

The global private equity market is a trillion-dollar market. In traditional markets, retail investors have only two paths to invest in Pre-IPO companies: either become a qualified investor and participate through private equity funds, with a threshold in the million-dollar range, or purchase employee-transferred old shares on secondary market platforms like Forge Global and EquityZen, which have very poor liquidity.

@ventuals is a project filling this vacuum on Hyperliquid, providing a Perp that tracks the valuations of private companies, allowing users to gain price exposure to valuation changes, with contract prices equal to company valuation divided by 1 billion. Contracts settle in USDH, with a maximum leverage of 3x.

Of course, pricing (Oracle Price) for private company valuation Perps is a challenge. Ventuals' approach is interesting: the Oracle Price is a weighted synthesis of off-chain valuation data and on-chain Mark Price. The off-chain part connects to Notice (a platform for private company valuation data), while the on-chain part is the 2-hour EMA of Mark Price. The two are synthesized into the Oracle Price with a weight of 1/3 : 2/3, updated every 3 seconds. Short-term fluctuations in Mark Price are also limited to prevent manipulation.

When the target company goes public, Ventuals' Perp will settle. After the opening on the first day of trading, Mark Price will turn into a reference for real-time stock prices, and Oracle Price will equal Mark Price, no longer referencing valuation data from the Noice platform. After the close, all Ventuals positions will settle at the closing price, transitioning the Pre-IPO Perp into a settlement based on the performance of the IPO on its first day, meaning traders are actually participating in the price game of the IPO, reminiscent of the prediction markets for new coins on Polymarket.

Interestingly, from Ventuals' data:

Source: https://x.com/smartestxyz/status/2033136128216244560

31% of Ventuals users had their first on-chain transaction in the Ventuals market, with nearly one-third entering the entire Hyperliquid ecosystem because of Pre-IPO Perp. 25% of users only trade in Ventuals, without touching any other HIP-3 Deployer. This validates what we previously said: RWA is indeed attracting an independent user group.

VI. Some Downstream Derivative Opportunities for RWA

However, RWA is not just about Trading and Holding; it is also giving rise to new downstream demands:

1) On-chain Stock Options: @ryskfinance @DeriveXYZ When people start holding and trading stocks on-chain, the demand for options is a natural extension, as the profiles of the two types of users overlap significantly. For example: 1) Holders of Tokenized TSLA want to earn additional income while holding long-term: sell Covered Calls to collect option premiums; 2) Traders long on TSLA Perp want to buy insurance for their leveraged positions by purchasing Puts to limit downside risk; 3) Those bullish on TSLA but think the current price is too high want to earn money while waiting for a pullback: sell Cash Secured Puts, and if it drops to the target price, they will buy, if not, they earn the option premium.

In the past, on-chain stock options did not exist because a key link was missing: market makers need to delta hedge options buy and sell orders using the underlying assets, but there were no sufficiently deep stock or futures trading venues on-chain to execute this hedge. Now that HIP-3's TSLA Perp has hundreds of millions in daily trading volume, this prerequisite condition has been met.

@RyskFinance has already validated covered calls and cash secured puts for cryptocurrencies on Hyperliquid, so adding stock options is a natural progression, as counterparties can directly delta hedge on Hyperliquid's Perp. @DeriveXYZ also supports Hyperliquid's deposits and uses HYPE + USDH as collateral; currently, the underlying is primarily crypto, but when stock Perp liquidity is deep enough, on-chain RWA options will simply add another underlying asset.

2) On-chain Stock Lending Market: @jup_lend @kamino @TermMaxFi The rapid growth of Tokenized Stock TVL naturally leads to the lending market. This is not just a simple logic of "using Tokenized TSLA as collateral to borrow USDC" (although this is a huge demand in itself, as long-term holders do not want to sell stocks but need liquidity). More interestingly, lending can help unlock a series of structural strategies:

• Looping: collateralize Tokenized TSLA → borrow USDC → buy more Tokenized TSLA → re-collateralize, amplifying TSLA exposure in a loop. On-chain composability is stronger, with no broker approvals needed.

• Funding Rate Arbitrage: when the funding rate for TSLA perp is positive (longs pay shorts), you can borrow USDC and long Tokenized TSLA (hold spot) + short TSLA Perp (hedge directional risk). Conversely, when the funding rate is negative, borrow Tokenized TSLA and sell (sell spot) + long TSLA Perp (hedge directional risk). Both strategies earn the spread between the funding rate and the borrowing rate. You can even use interest rate swap protocols like @SupernovaLabs, @iporio, and @boros_fi to help lock in borrowing costs or fund rate fluctuations! This is the on-chain version of classic cash and carry arbitrage.

The infrastructure supporting these strategies is already rapidly taking shape. The @solana ecosystem is moving the fastest: @kamino has already accepted xStocks as collateral to lend stablecoins, @jup_lend has also integrated xStocks, and @falconfinance accepts xStocks to mint synthetic dollars USDf. On the Ethereum/BNB side, @TermMaxFi has launched the first fixed-rate lending market using Ondo Tokenized Stock as collateral on the BNB Chain. With lending infrastructure in place, deepening Perp liquidity, and growing Tokenized Stock, the three feed into each other, creating a flywheel effect.

VII. Hoping This Time It Really Is Different

If you have been in the crypto industry long enough, seeing the words "traditional assets on-chain" may trigger a reflexive alert, just like it does for me, because this is not the first time.

1) The STO Boom of 2018-2019

Polymath, Harbor, and Securitize raised a lot of money, telling the story of "compliant tokenization." But traction was scarce, overly pursuing the supply side, spending a lot of energy on legal frameworks and regulatory connections with asset issuers, ultimately making it more complex than traditional IPOs. More fatal was the focus on tokenizing private equity, which inherently has a limited lock-up period; even if tokens are issued, they must wait for the lock-up to expire before trading, and the secondary market has no liquidity. Ultimately, only Securitize survived due to its ties with Circle and BlackRock. If the focus had been on the tokenization of public stocks or directly on Perp, the story might have been completely different. However, while BitMex's Perp had already begun to flourish at that time, no one thought it could be extended to non-crypto-native assets; the concept that everything could be Perp would have to wait for the brilliant young SBF from FTX to put it into practice years later.

2) The Stock Token Wave Led by FTX in 2021-2022

FTX launched tokenized stock trading: 24/7 trading of TSLA, AAPL, COIN, etc., backed 1:1 by the licensed German broker CM-Equity AG, supporting fractional share trading, bridging traditional finance and crypto. The product experience was actually very good, and users were there. But with FTX's collapse and SBF's imprisonment, everything was reset, and regulators immediately pointed out serious flaws in investor protection, leading to a complete loss of trust in the entire sector overnight. However, the product innovations left by FTX, including the idea that everything could be Perp, cross-asset collateral, and unified margin, have been almost completely inherited by the Hyperliquid ecosystem, with trust models corrected.

So what is different this time? With past experiences, the approach has changed:

First, it has shifted from supply-side driven to demand-side driven.

After FTX, every outbreak of RWA has been driven by demand: in 2022-2023, the DeFi collapse and on-chain yield plummeted, combined with the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, causing U.S. Treasury yields to soar to 5%. On-chain users naturally needed a U.S. Treasury product to obtain risk-free returns, leading RWA for U.S. Treasuries to grow from zero to billions in TVL, purely driven by demand.

This time, the logic for the explosion of RWA Perp is also clear: in early 2026, crude oil, gold, and silver surged, geopolitical crises continued, and traditional markets were closed on weekends, leaving only the chain open. 50,000 people came to Hyperliquid to trade stock indices and crude oil, with no flyers distributed, no airdrop incentives; it was real trading demand that brought them onto the chain.

Second, it focuses on things that traditional finance cannot provide.

In the past, STO was about "putting unwanted private assets on-chain": the underlying assets, legal frameworks, and trading logic were all copied from traditional finance, with blockchain merely serving as a clearing and settlement medium, and without liquidity, users had no reason to want it. This round is different: on the Perp side, 24/7 trading, Pre-IPO Perp, higher leverage, and no minimum capital requirements do not exist in traditional finance. On the Tokenized Stock side, global access and on-chain composability (for DeFi collateral, looping, funding rate arbitrage) are also things traditional brokers cannot provide. Users come not because the on-chain version of stocks is better than the brokerage version, but because these experiences only exist on-chain.

However, risks still exist: regulatory shifts, oracle attacks, issuer bankruptcies, liquidity crises—any one of these could cause this story to falter again.

With irreplaceability, there is confidence to attract new users.

And when 50,000 people first encounter crypto not to buy BTC but to trade stock indices and oil, when the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, invests $25 billion in OKX and takes a board seat, when Nasdaq applies for 23/5 and DTCC plans for 24/5 clearing, it is clear that the demand is real, and traditional finance is genuinely getting involved. At least this time, the starting point is different.

But do good deeds without asking about the future.