As RWA trading surges on Hyperliquid, Dragonfly’s Qureshi makes the case for a multichain future

Real-world assets now account for a substantial share of trading activity on Hyperliquid, reflecting a sharp shift from the platform's earlier dominance by bitcoin, ether, and other major crypto assets.

HIP-3, Hyperliquid's permissionless framework for builder-deployed perpetual markets, reached nearly 50% of the platform's perp volume earlier this summer, up from roughly 2% at the beginning of the year. TradeXYZ's equity markets dominated the category, including contracts tracking the Nasdaq-100 and individual stocks.

RWA perpetual volumes across exchanges reached about $470 billion in June, up from $85 billion in January, with Binance, Hyperliquid, and OKX accounting for more than 80% of the category.

Dragonfly Capital Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi said the shift reflects crypto's broader maturation toward tokenized stocks, bonds, and other real-world assets, arguing that the industry's next phase will require multiple specialized blockchains to meet institutional compliance requirements.

"Crypto native assets are great, but they're not the lion's share of what matters in the world," Qureshi said during an interview on The Starting Block from the Avalanche Summit in New York. "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 said institutions such as Goldman Sachs and BlackRock will ultimately need dedicated blockchain environments with their own compliance and operational guardrails, rather than relying on a single general-purpose chain. He rejected the idea that Ethereum, Solana or Avalanche will become a winner-take-all blockchain, comparing the networks to cities that can each develop their own network effects.

"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."

Many cities will benefit from their own network effects, Qureshi said. In his example, New York has a powerful network effect, but it’s inherently limited as all of the world’s people, businesses and economic activity can’t exist in a single city.

"So I think the same thing is true of blockchains," he said. "They have network effects, like cities, but they're not infinitely scalable the way that networks like Facebook or Instagram might be."