Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan says he’s drastically cut his estimates of when “on-chain finance” will take off after seeing investors pile into crypto platforms such as Hyperliquid to trade tokenized assets amid the US-Israel attack on Iran.
In a post on Tuesday titled “The weekend that changed finance,” Hougan said crypto perps futures platform Hyperliquid became the epicenter for trading real-world assets like crude oil and tokenized gold while the US, European and Asian stock exchanges were closed at the time of the first attack on Saturday at about 3:30 am 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 five to 10 years to move onchain but now sees that shift happening much sooner.
“This weekend proved me wrong. Now I’m convinced it’s going to happen much faster than that,” Hougan said, adding that blockchain’s 24/7 trading rails make “stock exchanges and T+1 settlement look archaic.”
Hougan said much of the weekend RWA trading activity took place on Hyperliquid, which saw over $11.5 billion in trading volume across Saturday and Sunday.
“When Bloomberg wanted to write about how crude oil responded to the bombing, it cited the Hyperliquid crude oil contract as the most relevant price,” Hougan said.
Tether’s tokenized gold product, Tether Gold (XAUt), also saw its 24-hour trading volume spike to over $300 million, while prediction markets volumes on Kalshi and Polymarket also rose, he noted.
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 custody features.
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However, no timeline was provided for the platform’s launch, nor were details shared about which blockchain it would be built on or whether it would operate in a permissionless or permissioned environment.
For now, Hougan said hedge funds, banks and other investors who want to “trade competitively” have no other choice but to set up a stablecoin wallet and learn how to trade on crypto perps platforms like Hyperliquid.
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