RWAs Aren't Coming Onchain. They're Already Here.

HRC held its first offline meetup in Seoul last week. As part of the event, GLC Research gave a small presentation on Trade.XYZ and equity perpetuals on Hyperliquid. For those who couldn't make it, the full talk is below.

Market Share Expansion Vs. CEXs despite though market conditions

So, I’ll start by reminding everyone that Hyperliquid isn’t just a perpetual exchange. It is a blockchain with an exchange built into it which enables anyone to permissionlessly build financial applications on top of it.

And this nuance is the reason why Hyperliquid just keeps gaining market shares from Centralized Exchanges, now representing around 15% of Binance Open Interest, as you can see on the graph.

And the best example of how important this is, is HIP-3 and TradeXYZ because equity perps are currently the biggest growth driver of Hyperliquid. And this is being built by an entirely external team, TradeXYZ.

TradeXYZ Growth Story

We always hear people talking about how equities and RWA are coming onchain. But it is already the case and Trade.XYZ is showing the way. As you can see, the numbers tell the story.

In November monthly volume was around $4B. In March, HIP-3 monthly volume was approaching $70B and XYZ represents 85% of total volume with a Monthly CAGR above 90%.

Trade.XYZ is an external team building on Hyperliquid, yet they now contribute ~30% of Hyperliquid's total volume while it has basically zero marginal cost for Hyperliquid.

This wouldn’t be possible if Hyperliquid was just a perpetual exchange.

Both 7d and 14d rolling average of HIP-3 volume are now above $2B in daily volume.

And Open Interest has been hitting new ATHs for 48 straight days and rolling averages are now also above $2B.

And behind this incredible growth story there are mainly 2 reasons:

1)TradeXYZ Team

TradeXYZ is the clear driver of HIP-3, with market dominance nearing 90%.

The reason behind this number is that XYZ has been the team writing the play-book on how equity perpetuals should be structured from oracle design, through discovery bounds and through funding rates, etc. They are the intellectual leader which explains why they’re dominating and why there is such adoption of equity perps on Hyperliquid.

2) Perpetual Derivatives are a great financial product.

The thesis about Perpetual derivatives being a superior product can be summarized in one word: Simplicity.

Indeed, looking at this table from Blockworks, the key difference between perps and options is that perpetual derivatives offer a linear payoff. There’s no time decay, no convexity payoff, expiry, strike, etc. All of this makes options very hard to understand for the average retail trader looking for delta exposure, directional exposure.

Still, the estimated retail flow for options is around $1T in daily volume, using mostly short dated options as they’re looking for short term high leverage equity exposure.

We believe this represents an important opportunity for Hyperliquid and the broader perpetual derivatives market.

This preference for perps isn't just theoretical, there’s been a couple of case studies, namely Bitmex & Binance, where millions of retail traders chose perps over options or futures.

Namely, Bitmex and Binance.We’re talking about exchanges with millions of average retail traders choosing perps over options and futures.

[First example is Bitmex which was the first crypto exchange to offer perps to traders. In a short period of time, Bitmex became the dominant crypto exchange eating market shares because perps was the preferred financial instrument for short term delta exposure.]

[Second one is Binance, as they were offering options and perps to their users. Perpetual derivatives were once again the preferred financial instruments.]

The question now is: “how efficient are Hyperliquid and XYZ markets for RWAs?”

Efficiency & Onchain Price Discovery

And I’m glad Shaunda Devens, from Blockworks, recently did two quantitative analyses on TradeXYZ markets to try answering that question.

1.Silver Market

Over the past months, silver has experienced extreme levels of volatility and even became the second most traded asset on Hyperliquid with Billions in volume.

The analysis shows that during this period, Hyperliquid was very competitive in terms of trade execution with median spreads being lower than COMEX over the analysed period. Median trade size differed significantly but still during one of the most volatile silver sessions ever, Hyperliquid quoted tighter spreads.

2.Oil Market

CME futures were closed over several weekends while geopolitical news was moving markets in real time. Trade.XYZ became the only continuously open venue for oil trading. Traders repriced OIL through live headlines directly on Hyperliquid. This was real price discovery happening onchain.

And this is true not only for Crude Oil but for 85% of all Hyperliquid markets according to Shaunda.

RWAs are not coming onchain. They're already here, trading on Hyperliquid thanks to TradeXYZ: efficiently, 24/7, and with real price discovery.

As we’ve seen the market opportunity is huge, we’re talking about Trillions in volume and I think we're currently only scratching the surface of what's possible. And I couldn't be more excited to watch Hyperliquid getting closer to “Housing All Of Finance” day after day.

Hyperliquid.