Revisiting RWA: Nearly 50,000 people's first on-chain transaction was not Bitcoin, but stock indices and crude oil
Core Viewpoint
The narrative of RWA is not about traditional finance stealing users from crypto, but rather crypto stealing users from traditional finance.Author: Bonna | U酪乳
1. 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 experienced 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 Open Interest in the HIP-3 market also surpassing $1.3 billion, a historical high.
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 overlook: 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 stands 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 users' first on-chain transaction was with them, facilitated by @ventuals' products.
Perhaps due to having experienced too many ups and downs in narratives, I have always had a preconceived bias against this 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 little 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 incorrect, and it also made me see that RWA can indeed steal users from Tradfi. By providing assets and experiences that traditional finance cannot offer, it truly expands the boundaries of the financial market by serving users that traditional finance cannot reach.
Hyperliquid has reignited my hope for RWA.
2. Why Traditional Finance Cannot Serve These People
To understand the core value proposition of RWA, one must clarify why nearly 50,000 addresses came on-chain, went to Hyperliquid, and not to traditional brokers.
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" simply does not exist for most people globally. On Hyperliquid, you can trade just 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 existing motivations for use.)
2) Extremely Low Barriers:
Traditional financial instruments usually have the 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, approximately $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 that stock margin trading has a maximum leverage of 2x (for overnight positions), and Pattern Day Traders can use up to 4x leverage intraday, but only if their account equity is not less than $25,000. In other words, you need to have $25,000 first to qualify for 4x leverage. On Hyperliquid, RWA Perp can offer 20x leverage without any 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 unlisted companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic; retail investors have no channels to trade their equity in traditional markets, but here they can, simply by staking HYPE as a HIP-3 Deployer.
5) 24/7 Experience:
Traditional commodity and stock markets have strict trading hours. Although major exchanges are constantly working to extend trading hours—for example, CME Globex has 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, with DTCC planning to achieve 24/5 clearing by 2026—most of these efforts address weekday issues, and weekends remain a vacuum. The weekend of February 28 was the best example: the U.S. launched airstrikes in Iran, market sentiment was turbulent, 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.
Traditional finance currently cannot achieve any of these five things:
Global access
Extremely low barriers
Higher leverage
Exclusive products
24/7 experience
Although traditional finance will try to get closer to a few of these in the foreseeable future, it is nearly impossible to meet all five simultaneously 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.
3. Two Types of Demand for RWA: Trading and Holding
Users flocking to the chain to gain exposure to RWA can actually be segmented into two different demands:
1) Trading:
Traders want leverage, 24/7 access, and low barriers. Most of the 50,000 Non-Crypto-First users should also belong to this category, aligning with Hyperliquid's positioning and user profile.
The product form that serves 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 the underlying asset.
@OstiumLabs' CTO Marco Antonio Ribeiro once said a very apt phrase:
Perp has two fundamental improvements over CFDs:
The first is 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 do not have.
The second is self-custody; your funds are always on-chain, not in the hands of the broker. The core issue with CFDs is that the broker is your counterparty; if you make money, they lose money, and this conflict of interest leads to numerous issues with black brokers manipulating quotes, slippage, and withholding profits.
Ultimately, traders do not care whether they actually hold a barrel of oil or a contract for an index; they are focused on making quick profits from price differences and volatility, ensuring that when they make money, they can smoothly withdraw it rather than having their profits withheld by black broker platforms under the guise of regulatory violations. In this regard, on-chain platforms like @HyperliquidX and emerging RWA Perp platforms like @OstiumLabs excel.
2) Holding:
But there is also a huge demand gap for another type: not trading, but holding. Long-term allocations in U.S. stocks, global indices, or even managing part of it as a pension; there are many non-U.S. users globally with this need, including myself, as one of the many users wanting to dollar-cost average into U.S. stocks and AI-related assets.
The product form that serves 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 Token to sell) or redeeming (buying Token → redeeming the underlying stock to sell), following the same logic as an ETF mechanism.
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 reputation and backing of the issuer become crucial; if users do not trust a certain issuer or believe it will continue to operate, they might as well withdraw their funds and put them into traditional brokers to buy stocks, which is complicated 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: using 1:1 real asset backing, licensed custody, and compliant structures to win the trust of long-term holders.
Even traditional financial giants are entering the field: 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 primarily focused on medium to long-term holding, with short-term trading as a secondary focus.
These two lines are rapidly developing in their respective ways, but they also share a structural issue:
Traditional markets are closed on weekends.
4. Core Issue 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 to tackle. After all, the price discovery for traditional assets still lies in traditional trading venues, and weekend prices are unanchored, which is a fact that cannot be changed in the short term.
For Perp, lack of anchoring 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 prices can be 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 over the weekend.
Currently, the entire industry is responding to this issue in two camps:
1) Conservatives: No trading on weekends, accept liquidity vacuum
@OstiumLabs, which does RWA Perp, is taking this route; when traditional markets close, no orders can be placed, and Oracle updates stop. @OndoFinance and @xStocksFi, which provide Tokenized Stock, are essentially also conservatives; minting and redemption only occur during U.S. stock trading hours. Although Tokens can be traded on DEX over the weekend, the official liquidity guarantee is not provided, and 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 mechanism. In the V1 version, the weekend price boundaries are set at ±5% of Friday's closing price; if it hits, it is locked. 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 at any moment, the immediate window remains ±5%.
Frankly speaking, price limits are not new to Chinese A-share investors: the main board has ±10%, the sci-tech innovation board has ±20%, and ST has ±5%. The 2015 stock market crash proved that price limits also have limitations: thousands of stocks hitting the limit down, and you want to sell but cannot. However, with the continuous extension of traditional market trading hours, @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). Once traditional markets open on Monday, external price anchoring is restored, and the overall risk can be absorbed by the deep liquidity of traditional markets. Essentially, Trade.xyz acts as a cushion to alleviate risks in advance, allowing traders to gradually hedge and adjust positions over the weekend rather than piling all the pressure on the moment the market opens on Monday, thus reducing the intensity of fluctuations after the traditional market opens.
@tradexyz is not the only radical in the 24/7 space.
@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 all HIP-3 Deployers that have deployed their own 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 a lot of overlap in the assets deployed by these Deployer, interestingly, this does not seem to be internal competition but more of a brokerage 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 do they necessarily go to the mixed UI of Hyperliquid's main site to trade, and data proves this:
Source: https://x.com/smartestxyz/status/2033136128216244560
Among the nearly 50,000 users who entered Hyperliquid for the first time due to 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.
5. Pre-IPO: Something Wall Street Cannot Do
The root of the weekend pricing issue 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 an opportunity.
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 old shares transferred by employees on secondary market platforms like Forge Global or EquityZen, which have extremely poor liquidity.
@ventuals is filling this vacuum on Hyperliquid by providing a Perp that tracks the valuations of private companies, allowing users to gain price exposure to valuation changes, with contract prices = company valuation / 1 billion. Contracts settle in USDH, with a maximum leverage of 3x.
Of course, pricing the private company valuation Perp (Oracle Price) is a challenge. Ventuals' approach is quite 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 the valuation data from the Notice platform. After the close, all Ventuals positions will settle at the closing price, and the Pre-IPO Perp transitions into a settlement slip based on the IPO performance on the first day, meaning that traders are actually participating in the price game of the IPO, reminiscent of the new coin listing FDV market on Polymarket.
Interestingly, from Ventuals' data:
Source: https://x.com/smartestxyz/status/2033136128216244560
31% of Ventuals users made their first on-chain transaction in the Ventuals market; nearly one-third entered the entire Hyperliquid ecosystem because of Pre-IPO Perp. 25% of users only trade in Ventuals and do not touch any other HIP-3 Deployer. This validates what we said earlier: RWA is indeed attracting an independent user group.
6. 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:
A holder of Tokenized TSLA wants to earn additional income while holding long-term: sell Covered Calls to collect option premiums;
A trader long on TSLA Perp wants to buy insurance for their leveraged position: buy Puts to limit downside risk;
Someone bullish on TSLA but thinks the current price is too high wants to make money while waiting for a pullback: sell Cash Secured Puts, ready to buy if it drops to the target price, otherwise just 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 TSLA Perp on HIP-3 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 involve adding an underlying asset.
2) On-chain Stock Lending Market: @jup_lend @kamino @TermMaxFi
As Tokenized Stock TVL grows rapidly, the lending market naturally follows. This is not just about "using Tokenized TSLA as collateral to borrow USDC" for liquidity release (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 approval 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 Borrow Rate. You can even use interest rate swap protocols like @SupernovaLabs_ and @iporio and @borosfi to lock in borrowing costs or funding 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 BNB Chain. With lending infrastructure in place, Perp liquidity deepening, and Tokenized Stock growth, the three feed into each other, creating a flywheel.
7. Hope 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 caution, as 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 minimal, 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 itself has a limited sale period; tokens must wait for lock-up periods to expire before they can be traded, 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 started to flourish at that time, no one thought to extend it to non-crypto-native assets; the concept of "everything can be Perp" would have to wait for the genius of SBF from FTX years later to be truly practiced.
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 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 wiped out, and regulators immediately pointed out serious flaws in investor protection, causing the entire sector's trust to evaporate overnight. However, the product innovations left by FTX, including "everything can be Perp," cross-asset collateral, and unified margin, have been almost entirely inherited by the Hyperliquid ecosystem, correcting the trust model.
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: the DeFi crash of 2022-2023, plummeting on-chain yields, coupled with the Fed's interest rate hikes, caused U.S. Treasury yields to soar to 5%. On-chain users naturally needed an on-chain U.S. Treasury product to obtain risk-free returns, leading U.S. Treasury RWA to grow from zero to billions in TVL, purely driven by demand.
This time, the logic behind the RWA Perp explosion is equally clear: in early 2026, crude oil, gold, and silver surged, geopolitical crises continued, and traditional markets closed on weekends, leaving only on-chain trading available. 50,000 people came to Hyperliquid to trade indices and crude oil without anyone handing out flyers or providing 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, lacking liquidity, and users had no reason to want to use it. This round is different: on the Perp side, 24/7 trading, Pre-IPO Perp, higher leverage, and no minimum funding thresholds are all things that 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 not provided by traditional brokers. Users come not because the on-chain version of stocks is better than the broker 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 comes the confidence to attract new users.
And when 50,000 people first encounter crypto not to buy BTC but to trade indices and oil, when ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, 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.
Risk warning
