Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan says he has dramatically lowered his estimate of when “on-chain finance” will boom after investors began flocking to crypto platforms like Hyperliquid to trade tokenized assets in the wake of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran.
In Tuesday’s post titled “The Weekend That Changed Finances,” Hougan he said Cryptocurrency futures platform Hyperliquid became the epicenter of trading in real-world assets such as crude oil and tokenized gold, while exchanges in the US, Europe and Asia were closed at the time of the first attack on Saturday around 3:30 a.m. UTC.
“For most of Sunday, onchain finance was at the center of the financial world,” he said, adding that he previously expected it would take five to 10 years for classic markets to come online, but now sees that transition happening much sooner.
“This weekend proved me wrong. Now I’m confident it will happen much faster,” Hougan said, adding that blockchain’s 24/7 trading rails make “T+1 exchanges and settlements look archaic.”
Hougan said most of the weekend’s RWA trading took place on Hyperliquid, which ended $11.5 billion trading volume on Saturday and Sunday.
“When Bloomberg wanted to write about the response of crude oil to the bombings, he cited the Hyperliquid crude oil contract as the most appropriate price,” Hougan said.
He noted that Tether’s tokenized gold, Tether Gold (XAUt), also saw a 24-hour boost in trading volume to over $300 million, while forecast market volumes on Kalshi and Polymarket also increased, he noted.
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 instant settlement of exchange-traded stocks and funds using a blockchain post-trade system that includes multi-chain support and custody functions.
Related: Ray Dalio warns against Bitcoin, says “there is only one gold”
However, no timeline was given for the platform’s launch, nor were there any details on what 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 choice but to set up a stablecoin wallet and learn to trade on cryptocurrency platforms like Hyperliquid.
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