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

Real-world assets have grown into a substantial slice of trading activity on Hyperliquid, marking a pronounced shift for a platform that was previously dominated by bitcoin, ether and other native crypto assets.

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework — a permissionless system that lets builders deploy their own perpetual markets — accounted for close to 50% of the platform's perp volume earlier this summer, up from roughly 2% at the start of the year. Equity-linked markets from TradeXYZ led the category, including contracts tracking the Nasdaq-100 and individual stocks.

The broader RWA perpetual market has expanded quickly in parallel. Volumes across exchanges reached about $470 billion in June, compared with $85 billion in January, with Binance, Hyperliquid and OKX together responsible for more than 80% of that activity.

Qureshi: institutions will need dedicated chains

Dragonfly Capital managing partner Haseeb Qureshi said the trend reflects crypto's wider maturation toward tokenised stocks, bonds and other real-world assets. Speaking on The Starting Block during the Avalanche Summit in New York, he argued the industry's next phase will involve multiple specialised blockchains rather than one general-purpose network.

"Crypto native assets are great, but they're not the lion's share of what matters in the world," Qureshi said. "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 large institutions such as Goldman Sachs and BlackRock will ultimately require dedicated blockchain environments with their own compliance and operational guardrails. He dismissed the idea that Ethereum, Solana or Avalanche will end up as a winner-take-all network, likening blockchains to cities that each generate 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." Those network effects, he added, are powerful but bounded — and unlike social networks such as Facebook or Instagram, chains cannot scale infinitely.