Stocks Just Topped Cryptocurrencies on Hyperliquid ARK says this changes everything

For the first time, traders on Hyperliquid moved more money through stocks and commodities compared to cryptocurrencies. Lorenzo Valente, Director of Digital Asset Research at ARK Invest The teacher announced Thursday Day X: “We are entering a new era Decentralized financeHe said Hyperliquid had for the first time generated more trading volume of so-called real-world assets, or RWAs, than cryptocurrencies in a single week.

RWAs — that is, tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments like a company’s stock, crude oil, or the S&P 500, that have been converted into blockchain-based contracts that traders can buy and sell around the clock — totaled $25.1 billion during the period July 13-19, or 52% of Hyperliquid’s weekly trading volume of $48.2 billion, according to Blockworks data. Valiente estimated the last figure at $26 billion and 54%.

Context makes this figure even more difficult. Permanent total Direct implementation Volume across the industry last week reached $79 billion. Hyperliquid processed $50 billion of it. RWA’s $26 billion worth of trading alone — just bets on stocks, oil futures, and indices — was larger than the combined crypto perpetual volume of every other decentralized exchange on the market.

How stocks ended up on the cryptocurrency exchange

The mechanism behind this is HIP-3, a Hyperliquid framework launched in October 2025 that allows offshore teams to build their own perpetual markets — contracts that track the price of an asset without an expiry date, allowing traders to bet on its rise or fall with borrowed money — using Hyperliquid’s existing infrastructure. Construction share 500,000 HYPE tokenscurrently worth approximately $30 million, to gain access to the system.

Since June, single stocks have outpaced indices and commodities within HIP-3, with single stock PEs now making up 61% of total RWA trading. the HIP-3 platform It has already hosted pre-IPO markets for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. “RWAs represent 54% of total trading volume,” Valente noted.

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

ARK’s interest in Hyperliquid goes back even further. In September 2025, CEO Cathie Wood told lead investor Podcast The platform “reminds me of Solana in the old days,” adding that Solana has proven its worth and earned its place among the biggest names in the cryptocurrency space. It called Hyperliquid “the new kid on the block,” and ARK has not confirmed any position since.

Now an ARK analyst raises a tougher question for the entire industry. “I am no longer convinced that RWA trading will naturally cluster in the same place as cryptocurrencies,” Valente wrote, predicting that niche category leaders will emerge within RWA — and that the platform’s grip on Bitcoin and Ethereum flow may be “far less important than many people assume.”

He added that traders are still focused only on cryptocurrencies, “and are focusing on the wrong market.”