Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hugan says he has scaled back his predictions for when “chain finance” will take off after seeing investors flock to crypto platforms like Hyperliquid to trade tokenized assets in the wake of the US-Israeli attack on Iran.
In a post on Tuesday titled “The weekend that changed finance,” Hogan said that the cryptoperps futures platform Hyperliquid has become a hub for trading real assets like crude oil and pegged gold, while U.S., European and Asian stock exchanges were closed at the time of the first attack on Saturday at 3:30 UTC.
“For most of Sunday, onchain finance was the center of the financial world,” he said, adding that he previously expected traditional markets to take 5 to 10 years to transition to onchain, but now sees the transition happening much faster.
“This weekend proved me wrong. Now I believe it will happen much sooner than that,” said Hougan, adding that blockchain’s 24/7 trading rails would make “stock exchanges and T+1 settlements archaic.”
Most of the RWA trading activity over the weekend took place on Hyperliquid, with trading volume of more than $11.5 billion on Saturday and Sunday, Hogan said.
“When Bloomberg wanted to write about how crude oil would react to the bombing, it called the Hyperliquid crude oil contract as the most relevant price,” Hugan said.
Tether’s gold product, Tether Gold (XAUt), also saw its 24-hour trading volume increase to more than $300 million, while the volume of prediction markets on Kalshi and Polymarket also increased, he said.
NYSE is building a 24/7 tokenization platform
In January, the New York Stock Exchange and its parent, the Intercontinental Exchange, said it would enable 24/7 trading and instant settlement of stocks and exchange-traded funds with a blockchain post-trade system, including multi-chain support and storage features.
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However, no timetable for the platform’s launch has been provided, and no details on what blockchain it will be built on or whether it will operate in a permissionless or permissioned environment.
At the moment, Hugan said, hedge funds, banks and other investors who want to “trade competitively” have no choice but to set up a stablecoin wallet and learn to trade on cryptoperps platforms like Hyperliquid.
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