Real-world assets now make up a significant portion of trading volume on Hyperliquid, demonstrating a clear departure from the network’s previous heavy reliance on bitcoin, ether, and other leading digital currencies.
HIP-3, which is Hyperliquid’s open framework enabling developers to launch custom perpetual markets, climbed to nearly 50% of the network’s perpetual volume in the early summer, rising sharply from about 2% at the start of the year. Equity markets on TradeXYZ led this sector, featuring contracts for individual equities and the Nasdaq-100 index.
Aggregate RWA perpetual turnover across all exchanges hit approximately $470 billion in June, surging from $85 billion in January, with OKX, Binance, and Hyperliquid driving over 80% of this market segment.
Haseeb Qureshi, who serves as Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, noted that this trend highlights the crypto sector’s wider evolution toward tokenized equities, debt securities, and other traditional financial assets, maintaining that the next era of the industry demands diverse, purpose-built blockchains to satisfy strict institutional regulatory demands.
“Crypto native assets are great, but they’re not the lion’s share of what matters in the world,” Qureshi stated during an episode of The Starting Block recorded at the Avalanche Summit in New York City. “So I think we’re now going through this maturation phase where we’ve proved we could do it on these internet native things, on these blockchain native assets. But proving you can do it with real-world assets requires you to move toward more heterogeneous chains, which is what Avalanche is all about.”
Qureshi explained that major financial institutions like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs will ultimately require customized blockchain infrastructures equipped with tailored regulatory and functional controls, instead of depending on one universal network. He dismissed the notion that Solana, Ethereum, or Avalanche will evolve into an absolute monopoly, likening these protocols to urban centers that independently build their own powerful economic gravity.
“We’re here in New York City right now. It’s one of the most valuable and, you know, happening cities in the world,” he remarked. “But it’s not true that most of the finance in the world is in New York. You know, the world’s a big place.”
A multitude of urban centers will thrive through their distinct localized advantages, according to Qureshi. In his analogy, New York commands formidable network momentum, yet it faces natural boundaries since humanity’s entire population, enterprises, and financial output cannot possibly fit inside one urban area.
“So I think the same thing is true of blockchains,” he concluded. “They have network effects, like cities, but they’re not infinitely scalable the way that networks like Facebook or Instagram might be.”
Originally published at https://www.theblock.co/news/ecosystems/2026-09-17-as-rwa-trading-surges-hyperliquid-dragonflys-qureshi-makes-case-multichain-future-415406.
