Risk On: Biotech Perps, Altcoin DATs & Cashcats 😼

Crypto Twitter is talking about cat memes again. Meme adventures are happening on Robinhood Chain—not with Puss n Boots, but with Cashcat, a memecoin. Perps exchanges have been slow to list; among our RWA-focused set of venues, only Aster supports a Cashcat perp so far. That market opened Jul 8 and had cleared $23.9M in volume by the end of the week. 

There's plenty of ways to get liquidated, including new biotech perps and new perps on the SK Hynix Nasdaq ADR ($SKHY). Just remember to DYOR…oops! sorry!

This week's Tweet of the Week was a late entry from podcaster Alex Popovic of Rise Up Media. He may have a point: the “do your own research” disclaimer feels more like marketing at this point and less like boilerplate from the Legal dept, and it’s as ubiquitous as podcasters' handheld windscreen muffs. If you're going to DYOR, do it here on Stork Research, and start with the 1H 2026 brief we sent out, Friday.

Looks like another plateau in RWA perpetual futures volume. Wouldn't be surprised to see another growth spurt in the coming weeks. Right now, RWA perps are no more than 15% of the total perpetual futures market, but take a look at the share of Hyperliquid volume that Trade[XYZ] clears: it's now 45%. Would it surprise you if perps at large started to look more like this? 

Market share for each category holding roughly steady: 57% equity perps; 22% commodities; 18% ETFs; 3% indexes. (We're not counting FX perps yet but will be soon; you can see in our 1H brief that forex has reached a significant share of the RWA perps market.)

SKHYNIX volume here is on the Korea-traded stock; excitement for this contract grew ahead of the largest foreign listing in history, the debut of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) under the ticker SHKY (initially SKHYV, here's why). 

SKHY perps cleared $901M in total volume on the week (to $24.3B in the pre-existing contracts on the South Korean stock). Bitget got out ahead and did $142M in SKHY volume, with a pre-listing contract that opened Jul 2. But that was only the third largest market: Binance got in the day of the listing and cleared $259M; Trade[XYZ] on Hyperliquid got in the day ahead and cleared $444M by the end of the week, with $321M on Friday alone.

No surprise seeing AI-adjacent ETF and equity perps top the new listings by volume: this week it's the Tradr 2X Long Sndk Daily ETF on Binance at the top, and Australia HQ'd / Nasdaq-listed SharonAI Holdings, a "neocloud" infrastructure company, in No. 2. After that is where it gets interesting. 

No. 3 BNC is CEA Industries, a Binance Coin (BNB) digital asset treasury company that also owns a vape maker in Canada and a cannabis cultivation equipment operation. (So…that's your degen allocation right there - no need for memes.) Only surprise further down is that Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR) wasn't already perpified, ahead of this Bybit listing.

The State Street SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (XBI) in a perp on Binance is interesting. Biotech as a category is fairly underrepresented in the perpiverse: of the top 10 biopharma stocks, only two had listings prior to this week. That number is now three, with OKX's listing of JNJ and this Binance biotech ETF perp. (None of the top 10 holdings in XBI do, as of now.) As usual, narratives develop at the bottom. (And, if anyone tells you perps are too risky for retail, remind them that short-dated options on biotech stocks are as easy to get as scratch tickets.)

This issue covers the week ending July 12, and draws on volume data from Aster, Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Coinbase International, Crypto.com, EdgeX, GMTrade, Grvt, Kraken, Lighter, OKX, Orderly, and Trade[XYZ] on Hyperliquid.

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