Venues, asset classes, and reference-asset groups: a data-driven view of onchain real-world-asset perpetual futures, prepared by RWA Foundation.
This report is published by RWA Foundation using data from DefiLlama's RWA perpetuals dataset. It covers the onchain market for perpetual futures referencing real-world assets: equities, equity indices, precious metals, energy, foreign-exchange pairs, ETFs, private equity, bonds, and AI and compute infrastructure. All figures are 30-day trailing figures as of the report date unless otherwise noted.
The scope of this report is venues and reference assets, not chains. It ranks the top venues by 30-day volume and open interest, breaks volume down by DefiLlama's asset-class taxonomy and by the underlying reference-asset group, and ranks the individual markets generating the most trading activity. No protocol-level infrastructure metrics beyond fees are included, this is a market-structure view of the venues and the assets referenced on them.
Across DefiLlama's tracked RWA perp dataset, 835 active markets across 16 venues generated $128.4B in 30-day volume, with $4.86B in aggregate open interest and an estimated $36.9M in protocol fees. Trade.xyz, a Hyperliquid HIP-3 deployer settling on Hyperliquid's core matching engine, dominates with roughly 70% of all RWA perp volume, more than the next fifteen venues combined.
Stock-perps are the largest asset class at $66.48B (51.8% share) across 580 markets, followed by commodity-perps at $30.37B (23.7%) and broad equity-index perps at $14.97B (11.7%). By reference-asset group, public equities account for over half of volume, with precious metals and equity indices each carrying a roughly 13-14% share, and oil close behind at 9.3%.
The RWA perpetuals market, taken as a whole, is new and sharply concentrated. A single Hyperliquid-settled venue, Trade.xyz, carries roughly seven in every ten dollars of volume and three-quarters of open interest, and within that venue a small cluster of tickers does an outsized share of the work: two broad equity indices, a run of semiconductor and memory names, and a handful of precious-metals and energy contracts.
Asset-class figures suggest a market roughly evenly split between equities, commodities, and indices, but the top-15-markets view tells a narrower story: memory and semiconductor exposure, not equities broadly, is what is actually driving single-market volume on the dominant venue. Precious metals and oil, tracked separately as commodity-perp and by reference-asset group, together account for close to a quarter of the market and remain concentrated around a handful of gold, silver, and crude contracts split across Trade.xyz and variational.
The long tail below the top eight venues, entropy through paradex, together carries well under 2% of volume despite offering meaningful market count and, in Ostium's case, open interest disproportionate to volume - a pattern consistent with a market still early in venue consolidation, where liquidity has not yet spread evenly across the growing number of places to trade these products.