Founder of Theory Ventures: The RWA market's growth rate surpasses AI, becoming the fastest-growing market in the world

The founder of the venture capital firm Theory Ventures, Tomasz Tunguz, stated that the fastest-growing market globally is not AI, but the crypto market formed by real-world assets (RWA) on the blockchain. He noted that RWA enables stocks and commodities like oil and copper to be traded on-chain, taking on almost all public price discovery during commodity exchange closures.

Tunguz mentioned that RWA, through perpetual contracts for stocks, provides pre-IPO pricing for Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Cerebras, and brings international access channels. He cited data indicating that the perpetual price of Cerebras before its IPO differed from the Nasdaq opening price by less than 1.3%, with SpaceX having a perpetual open interest of approximately $215 million and a cumulative trading volume of about $2.2 billion before its IPO. A report from Pantera Capital in September 2026 showed that the trading volume of perpetual contracts for stocks on Hyperliquid and Lighter reached $67.8 billion in June, which is 16 times that of tokenized stock spot trading.

He also stated that stablecoins have become one of the top ten buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds, surpassing China, Norway, and Switzerland, and are used to settle transactions of the aforementioned tokenized assets. Institutions such as JPMorgan, HSBC, BlackRock, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Franklin Templeton, Robinhood, and Stripe are advancing RWA.