Perpetuals on Gold, Oil, and Stocks: $117 Billion Traded in One Month

Forty-four times more in twelve months. The a16z crypto fund estimates $117.3 billion in monthly volume in August 2026 for perpetual futures contracts backed by real-world assets. And 86% of these trades now occur through on-chain protocols.

Behind these figures, gold, oil, currency pairs, stock indices, and now stocks are traded 24 hours a day from a wallet, without brokers or opening hours.

Key Points

• Perpetual derivatives backed by gold, currencies, indices, or stocks traded $117.3 billion in August, a volume multiplied by 44 in one year.
• More than eight out of ten transactions now occur on-chain rather than on centralized platforms.
• These contracts do not tokenize anything: a price oracle and collateral in stablecoins are sufficient to create exposure.
• In Europe, MiCA does not cover these products; they remain under MiFID II, and ESMA caps leverage for the general public, a framework that DEXs do not apply.

RWA: $117.3 Billion of Perpetuals in One Month

On Wednesday, September 23, the investment fund a16z crypto, the digital assets branch of Andreessen Horowitz, published an article on X reflecting on the rise of perpetual markets linked to real-world assets (RWA).

In total, the fund identified a volume of $117.3 billion in these markets in one month. By comparison, a year earlier, the same segment was around $2.7 billion per month.

The shift is due to a unique product, the perpetual future or contract without an expiration date. While it has no expiration, it continuously rebalances through a funding rate paid between buyers and sellers, the only mechanism that keeps its price aligned with that of the underlying asset. Applied to a barrel of Brent or a Nvidia stock, it offers exposure settled in stablecoins, without any asset changing hands.

On the ground, liquidity has concentrated on a handful of protocols. Ostium, deployed on Arbitrum, specializes in commodities and Forex. Avantis on Base complements the offering with other indices. Finally, Hyperliquid opened its HIP-3 standard in October 2025, allowing any team to deploy its own perpetual market, including stocks.

Perps RWA: 86% of Volume Now On-Chain

But the real breakthrough lies in the distribution of these $117.3 billion. Indeed, 86% are traded on-chain, amounting to about $101 billion, compared to only $16 billion on centralized platforms. CFD brokers and CEXs still concentrated two-thirds of the volume tracked until November 2025, when the shift occurred. Hyperliquid opened the door to HIP-3 the month before; mere coincidence?

The weekend weighs heavily in this migration. When CME and Nasdaq close on Friday night, gold and U.S. indices continue to quote on on-chain protocols until Sunday, and traders find coverage against Monday's opening gaps. Market makers, capturing the spread.

The Regulatory Blind Spot of Perps on Real Assets

This architecture has a direct consequence. Nothing is held by a custodian. No transfer agent registers a holder in the ledger, and the protocol relies solely on a price oracle and a pool of collateral in stablecoins. Adding cocoa or the Mexican peso costs a line of configuration, whereas tokenizing a stock requires months of legal work.

Hester Peirce, SEC commissioner, already warned issuers of tokenized stocks on July 9, 2025.

< Tokenized securities remain securities. >
Hester Peirce, Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission

Perps on stocks do not fall under this statement: they are treated as derivatives and are generally under the CFTC in the United States, even if the boundary with the SEC is not definitively settled. Most protocols block U.S. addresses. In Europe, MiCA does not cover derivatives backed by non-crypto underlyings, which remain under MiFID II. ESMA caps retail leverage at 5 to 1 on an individual stock, 20 to 1 on gold or a major index, and 30 to 1 on major currency pairs. DEXs, on the other hand, commonly display 50 to 100 times the stake on currency pairs.

The pace of August places this market beyond $1.4 trillion in annualized volume, while Hyperliquid alone processes around a hundred billion dollars per month across all perps. The potential remains vast on the side of stocks and commodities, whose derivatives markets trade tens of trillions of dollars per month and close on Friday night.