Binance Takes Over the Top | RWA Perps Growth Signal

You may notice some changes in this week's report. Stork has been growing our research practice, adding insight to the oracle price feeds and market data we deliver for clients. As a result, we’re consolidating our research efforts under "Stork Research." 

That means no changes to the content of this newsletter, but the "Perpetuals Weekly" name is retiring. Building a standalone research brand has been fun, but ultimately we're seeing the most momentum as a comprehensive research and advisory operation. We'll continue to focus this weekly report on RWA perps data, as we expand into other adjacent areas where Stork is active: prediction markets and tokenized assets, to name two. We’re looking forward to sharing expanded coverage from Stork Research in these areas and beyond.

There's plenty to cover, including, this week's launch of Hypercall, a new stock-options DEX built by Synapse on Hyperliquid. Perps have dominated crypto and RWA derivatives, and Deribit (owned by Coinbase) has dominated options’ narrow slice of the market. But Hypercall got a good amount of attention when BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes endorsed it and Synapse's native token.

Reactions to Hypercall ranged from enthusiastic to cynical (maybe mostly cynical), which could be due to just general horror / disgust as Crypto Twitter doomscrolls through Strategy's conversion into a "Inverse Cramer" market signal. Or it could be due to just general fatigue at too many bad ideas, as noted crypto lawyer & entrepreneur Gabriel Shapiro suggests in this week's Tweet of the Week. Social scientists have known since 1970 that financial incentives can mess up good things like blood donations. Maybe that holds true for open-source software development, too. 

(The Tweet of the Week is back by popular demand! Thanks to all who wrote in.)

It was the second biggest week ever for RWA perps volume at $112.7B (just slightly more than the week of June 8, which came in at $112B even). This on a week when the July 4 holiday (observed July 3 in US traditional markets) cut volume by a half to two thirds, relative to other days of the week. Overall, it’s a growth signal for RWA perps, when even slow weeks look like this. 

ETFs continued to grow as a category, now up to 18% of RWA perps market volume, while commodities continued to decline: Commodities are now 21.82%, after falling steadily from 67% at the week of May 11. Equities held steady at about 57%.

This week, the Trade[XYZ] index perp in the Nasdaq 100 proxy, XYZ 100, fell out of the top 10 underlying assets by volume, leaving the entire field to Binance. Trade[XYZ] still dominates the top two index perps with the XYZ 100 and their licensed S&P 500 perp, but at $1.8B (down 42% week over week) and $1.7B (down 20% week over week) in weekly volume, respectively, they’re no longer among the largest markets by volume in RWA perps. 

Binance and Hyperliquid have taken the top two spots by volume for some time, but for the past four weeks, Binance's share of volume (now 57.9%) has been growing, while Hyperliquid's share (now 13.9%) has been steadily shrinking.

The SOXL and DRAM ETFs were basically flat, week over week, but KORU, the Direxion Daily MSCI South Korea Bull 3X ETF, quadrupled in volume, as traders look to Asia stocks in the AI trade.

Another notable signal that the RWA perps markets are driven by an AI meta: The largest and most plentiful net-new listings this week were in the GraniteShares 2x Long MRVL Daily ETF (MVLL), a leveraged ETF on Marvell Technology (MRVL). AI sentiment also accounts for new listings in Texas Instruments, but that stock’s narrative also comes from recovery in industrial and automotive demand. Bybit put up the second and third best numbers here, with listings in both. 

Asia equity perps listings continue to pop up here, but so far they rarely trade among the heaviest, last week’s listings of Zhipu on Hyperliquid and Bitget being the exception. Asian-markets underlyings mostly dwell in the long-tail portions of the chart, for now. In case you were wondering, Bitget's ASX listing here is ASE Technology, a Taiwan-headquartered semiconductor manufacturing services company that trades on the NYSE.

This issue covers the week ending July 5, and draws on volume data from Aster, Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Coinbase International, Crypto.com, EdgeX, GMTrade, Grvt, Kraken, Lighter, Orderly, OKX, and Trade[XYZ] on Hyperliquid.

If you have questions about methodology or other data you’re seeking, please get in touch: [email protected].