This market barely existed 5 months ago.
Last week, I had a data-driven discussion with
@AliceCrypto3, Head of Research at
@CoinMarketCap , on the key trends shaping RWAs. ⚙️
🔻 One market stood out in particular: RWA perps.
A few datapoints we discussed on stage:
• The RWA perps market has grown around 10x since Dec'2025
• Weekly trading volume already reached $50B
• CEXs still dominate overall volumes, although there were days in early March when Hyperliquid volumes briefly surpassed centralised venues
• Around 65% of all RWA perps volume comes from commodities, followed by stocks and ETFs
• HIP-3 platforms alone (including
@tradexyz and
@ventuals) are already processing around $1.5B in daily volume
• Hyperliquid is clearly leading this category today, while players like
@edgeX_exchange , Ostium and Lighter are experimenting with different distribution strategies to catch up.
@Lighter_xyz's recent integration with
@Wallet_tg is a good example.
• CEX are also launching new RWA perp products almost every week – e.g.,
@coinbase recently announced new perpetuals on AI and defence ETFs (US and China)
• Pre-IPO exposure is another emerging opportunity, with interesting price discrepancies already appearing across Hyperliquid, CEXs and tokenised spot markets like
@PreStocks.
• • • • •
❌ Despite all this growth, the market is still tiny relative to TradFi.
Energy and metals futures alone trade around $200B-400B in daily volume globally, meaning on-chain RWA perps are still well below 1% of traditional derivatives markets.
Which also shows the scale of the opportunity. 🎯
24/7 markets, hashtag#global accessibility, easier distribution, DeFi composability – it is not difficult to see why this category is gaining traction so quickly.
• • • • •
🗣️ Also, really liked the format we picked together with Alice for this session. Instead of a classic keynote, it became more of a relaxed dialogue around actual market data and charts prepared by her and the broader CoinMarketCap team in advance.
I think this worked extremely well: discussing concrete numbers directly from the slides gave the audience more context and made the conversation practical and grounded. 💡
Was a real pleasure doing this session together with Alice – definitely one of my favourite discussions from last week!