{
  "id": 19496,
  "title": "RWA perps will outpace tokenization",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/07/31/rwa-perps-will-outpace-tokenization",
  "topic": "finance",
  "section": "Finance & Markets",
  "published": "2026-07-31T13:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "CoinDesk",
    "slug": "coindesk",
    "url": "https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2026/07/31/rwa-perps-will-outpace-tokenization"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Tokenization has gained approval from industry leaders like Larry Fink, and major financial institutions such as Blackrock, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton have already tokenized their assets. The tokenization of assets has reached over $34 billion, not including the $300 billion in tokenized dollars. However, the rapid growth of real-world asset perps, or RWAs, is outpacing tokenization. RWAs hit $347 billion in volume in May, a staggering 1,472x increase from the $230 million traded at the beginning of 2025. On decentralized exchanges (DEXs) alone, daily open interest reached a record high of $4.5 billion in July. By the end of May, exchanges facilitated $1.32 trillion in volume, which is 13 times the volume seen in all of 2025. The surge in RWAs is attributed to crypto traders seeking exposure to RWAs like commodities and AI equities. Perps offer a continuously running, efficient market in a simple interface, removing the limitations of expiry dates, complicated greeks, and less intuitive interfaces found in TradFi alternatives like futures and options. Martin Lee, Market Insights Lead of DWF Labs, predicts that derivatives volumes will outgrow their underlying spot markets, similar to what has been observed in equities, commodities, and crypto. Despite tokenized equities having a larger base with 180,845 wallets compared to 24,378 for equity perps, perp holders are compounding at a rate of approximately 33% per month, compared to 17% for spot. As perps are easier to launch and offer novel synthetic markets, they are rapidly gaining traction. The acceleration of RWAs is driven by the rapid experimentation in perp markets, leading to the creation of fresh opportunities. Pre-IPO markets exemplify this, as retail traders gain access to private companies for the first time, and institutions benefit from better price discovery. RWA perps started the year at just 1.3% of on-chain perp volume, but now account for 31%. This shift is driven by the agility of crypto-native platforms in comparison to large, regulated incumbents. As on-chain products reach escape velocity, they get adopted upstream, with Robinhood already offering RWA perps to European customers. It is not far-fetched to imagine perps becoming the primary way the masses trade every asset class, not just crypto.",
  "summary": "Tokenization was crypto's first big export to TradFi. Perps are next, says Martin Lee, markets insight lead at DWF labs.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}