Stocks surpass cryptocurrencies in Hyperliquid. ARK says it changes everything

For the first time, Hyperliquid’s traders moved more money through stocks and commodities than through cryptocurrencies. Lorenzo Valente, director of digital asset research at ARK Invest, announced the milestone at X on Thursday. DeFi.” He said Hyperliquid generated more trading volume in so-called real assets (RWAs) than cryptocurrencies in a week for the first time.

RWAs (which refer to tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments such as company stocks, crude oil or the S&P 500) are converted to blockchain-based contracts that traders can buy and sell around the clock. This totaled $25.1 billion for July 13-19, or 52% of Hyperliquid’s weekly volume of $48.2 billion, according to Blockworks data. Valente recently estimated the performance at $26 billion, or 54%.

Depending on the situation, that number becomes more difficult. total permanent dex Last week, industry-wide transaction volume was $79 billion. Hyperliquid handled $50 billion of this. The $26 billion in RWA trading alone (including stock bets, oil contracts, and index plays alone) was greater than the combined cryptocurrency perpetual volume of all other decentralized exchanges in the market.

How stocks ended up on cryptocurrency exchanges

The mechanism behind it is HIP-3, a framework released by Hyperliquid in October 2025. The framework allows external teams to use Hyperliquid’s existing infrastructure to build their own perpetual markets – contracts that track the price of an asset without an expiration date and allow traders to bet on the price of the asset rising or falling with borrowed money. Builders stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, currently worth about $30 million, to access the system.

Since June, individual stocks have overtaken indices and commodities within HIP-3, with single-stock perpetual contracts now accounting for 61% of all RWA trading. The HIP-3 platform has already hosted pre-IPO markets for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. “RWAs accounted for 54% of total volume,” Valente said.

The most traded stock is SK Hynix, a South Korean memory chip maker that competes with Samsung in supplying DRAM and high-bandwidth memory for AI systems.

ARK’s interest in Hyperliquid goes back further. In September 2025, CEO Cathie Wood said on the Master Investor podcast that the platform “reminds me of Solana in the early days,” adding that Solana has proven its worth and earned a place with some of the biggest names in the cryptocurrency industry. She called Hyperliquid “the new kid on the block,” and ARK has not confirmed any position since.

Now, one of ARK’s analysts is raising a more difficult question for the industry as a whole. “We are no longer confident that RWA transactions will naturally be aggregated in the same place as cryptocurrencies,” Valente wrote. A dedicated category leader could emerge within RWA, he predicted, and the platform’s grip on Bitcoin and Ethereum flows could be “much less significant than many people think.”

He added that traders are still only focused on cryptocurrency tokens. “You’re focusing on the wrong market.”