Real-World Asset Trading Surges on Hyperliquid as Dragonfly's Qureshi Argues for Multichain Future

Trading shifts toward real-world assets

Real-world assets (RWAs) — tokenized versions of traditional assets like stocks and bonds — now make up a significant portion of trading on Hyperliquid, a crypto derivatives platform. This marks a sharp change from earlier days when bitcoin, ether, and other major cryptocurrencies dominated.

Hyperliquid's HIP-3, a framework that lets builders create their own perpetual markets (a type of futures contract), reached nearly 50% of the platform's perpetual volume in early summer. That's up from about 2% at the start of the year. TradeXYZ's equity markets led this category, including contracts tracking the Nasdaq-100 and individual stocks.

Key numbers in RWA trading

• RWA perpetual volume across exchanges hit about $470 billion in June, up from $85 billion in January.
• Binance, Hyperliquid, and OKX together accounted for more than 80% of that volume.

What Qureshi says about the future

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, said the shift reflects crypto's broader move toward tokenized real-world assets. He believes the next phase will need multiple specialized blockchains to meet institutional compliance needs.

"Crypto native assets are great, but they're not the lion's share of what matters in the world," Qureshi said in an interview at the Avalanche Summit in New York. He added that proving blockchain can handle real-world assets requires moving toward "more heterogeneous chains," which is what Avalanche focuses on.

Qureshi said institutions like Goldman Sachs and BlackRock will need dedicated blockchain environments with their own compliance and operational safeguards, rather than one general-purpose chain. He dismissed the idea that Ethereum, Solana, or Avalanche would become a winner-take-all blockchain, comparing networks to cities.

"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 said. "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."

Like cities, blockchains have network effects but are not "infinitely scalable" in the way that social networks like Facebook or Instagram might be, Qureshi said.

Sources

• The Block

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