RWA perpetuals hit $18.8B daily; 19% of traders kept altcoins

RWA perpetual futures tied to oil, gold, stocks, indices and pre-IPO companies averaged $18.8 billion in daily trading during Sept. 3–9, equal to 18.5% of futures volume across the venues tracked. Over the same period, crypto-denominated perpetual futures declined in the sample while total futures activity remained roughly flat.

Data show RWA perpetuals rose from under $1 billion in daily volume in January to the September weekly peak. Traditional-asset perpetual contracts accounted for a large share of futures volume on some platforms, about 28% on Hyperliquid and roughly 24.8% on Binance in the sampled venues. The weekly increase was driven in part by oil trading as Brent prices crossed $100.

A wallet-level analysis on Hyperliquid, covering new accounts from Jan. 1 through June 30, classified 169,514 new wallets as RWA-first, representing 31.7% of new wallets. Those wallets generated $111.6 billion, or 31.5%, of trading volume from new users, but produced only 8.3% of the primary trading fees paid by new users. RWA-first wallets kept 83.6% of their volume inside RWA markets.

Users who entered via crypto or other non-RWA products sent 22.8% of their volume into RWA markets and supplied roughly 40% of RWA-market volume. Follow-up analysis found 80.9% of RWA-first wallets never traded in other markets, while 82% of Other-first wallets never entered RWA markets. Cross-market trading rose among the most active traders, creating a smaller group that trades across both product sets.

Platform economics have shifted as external builders deploy RWA markets. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework lets outside teams launch perpetual markets and retain up to 50% of trading fees. Fees routed to the platform’s Assistance Fund are converted into the native HYPE token and burned; only a portion of builder-market activity flows into those token-linked mechanisms.

Company-level figures show gross fees at Hyperliquid rose from $320 million in the first half of 2025 to $419.3 million in the first half of 2026, while the fee share returning to the platform treasury fell from $317.5 million to $305.3 million as builder-deployed markets claimed more activity. Over the month analyzed, Hyperliquid’s total open interest climbed from $6.6 billion to $8.8 billion while HIP-3’s share of activity slipped from 34% to 25%.

Across centralized exchanges, new token listings slowed in the second quarter, with one listings tracker counting 351 new tokens across 10 major exchanges, the fewest since the third quarter of 2023; 42 of those additions were tokenized assets. One exchange reported a large number of delistings in the first half of the year. Data from a tokenized-stock program show 58.5% of early users of tokenized stocks also used perpetuals, direct equities, or both.

Exchange-level volume rose in the months sampled. Centralized-exchange volume increased month over month, with spot up and derivatives activity also higher; traditional-asset perpetual volume expanded in that period to roughly $602 billion. Exchanges now list both crypto and tokenized-asset derivatives that share collateral systems, order books and user interfaces, and fee flows for builder-deployed markets are divided among protocol treasuries, external deployers and token-linked mechanisms.