TradFi operates 24/7/365 Crypto Rails: Bitwise
Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hugan says he has scaled back expectations for when “on-chain finance” will take off after seeing investors pile into crypto platforms like Hyperliquid amid the US-Israeli attack on Iran.
In a post titled “The Weekend That Changed Finance” on Tuesday, Haugan said the crypto perps' Futures platform, a hyperliquid trading hub for real-world assets like crude oil and gold tokenized, was closed when US, European and Asian stock exchanges hit the first strike at 3:30 a.m. UTC on Saturday.
“For most of Sunday, onchain finance was the center of the financial world,” he said. He previously expected traditional markets to take five to 10 years to move onchain, but now sees that shift happening sooner.
“I was proven wrong this weekend. Now I'm sure it will happen even sooner than that,” said Hugan, adding that blockchain's 24/7 trading railroads “seem antiquated to stock exchanges and T+1 settlement.”
Hugan said the majority of the weekend's RWA trading activity took place on Hyperliquid, which saw more than $11.5 billion traded on Saturday and Sunday.
“When Bloomberg wanted to write about how crude oil responded to the bombing, he cited the hyperliquid crude oil contract as the most important price,” Hugan said.
Tether Gold (XOUT), the gold product of the Tether token, also reported a 24-hour trading volume of more than $300 million, with Kalshi and Polymarket predicting a higher market size.
NYSE is building a 24/7 tokenization platform.
In January, the New York Stock Exchange and its parent Intercontinental Exchange said it would enable 24/7 trading and faster stock and currency exchange through a blockchain post-trade system, including multi-chain support and security features.
Related: Ray Dalio Warns on Bitcoin, Says ‘There's Only One Gold'
However, a timeline for the platform's launch was not provided, nor were details shared on which blockchain it would be built on or whether it would operate in an unlicensed or permissioned environment.
These days, Hugan says, hedge funds, banks and other investors have no choice but to set up a stable coin wallet and learn how to trade on crypto perps platforms like Hyperliquid to “trade competitively.”
Magazine: South Korea gets rich from crypto… North Korea gets weapons.
