Shanghai Pre-IPO Futures | Ondo Perps’ Top Markets | GMTrade Dominates FX

RWA perpetual futures volume is flat or down, with some cracks showing in the AI trade and commodity perps activity continuing to decline, despite a fresh round of Mideast instability. 

Still, RWA perps aren't retreating from what looks like a new baseline of $100B in weekly volume, and exchanges are searching for the new meta, listing pre-IPO perps from Asia (ChangXin Memory Technologies) and an equity perp on a company that combines bitcoin mining and AI data centers (MARA Holdings).

Infrastructure innovations show signs of promise: this week, we add Ondo Perps data to our weekly report, after the exchange crossed $3B in cumulative volume. Ondo offers the ability to use onchain assets like tokenized stocks as collateral on its perps market, a kind of capital efficiency it’s well positioned to deliver. So far, the top markets on Ondo Perps are gold and silver, each with $776M in volume from their first trades on March 16 (during Ondo Perps beta phase), through Sunday.

RWA perps are still a smallish share of the overall perpetual futures market, but the consistent growth narrative is there; for perps on BTC, ETH, SOL and other crypto assets, it isn't. Volume mostly declined in the first half, and the advent of regulated crypto perps in June hasn't yet shown signs of turning around that narrative, as our report on regulated crypto perps (out last week) shows. 

Worth reading this week: Lauris on the evolving taxonomy of 24/7 markets, where the fastest operators are viewing market categories (predictions, derivatives, spot, etc.)  not as lane dividers but as different GTM channels. 

If you know someone who should be watching, forward this email to a friend. If you got this email from a friend, sign up here to get it every Monday.

Tweet of the Week goes to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who announced his account had been hacked after posting a thread about RWAs that was widely derided as slop, putting a final comic punctuation mark on the entire episode. The original post (screenshot above, now deleted) did look like it came straight from the agenda of a 2019 security tokens conference. But I think Crypto Twitter would have readily forgotten it if Chesky started posting real thoughts about real-world assets. There are two clear takeaways: 1. Brian Chesky has not been keeping an eye on RWA tokenization; 2. His social media team does not care about X. 

Also: "quietly" is the new AI writing tell. (Best writers avoid most adverbs, anyway).

The addition of FX perps doesn’t do much to change the shape of this chart, but with the recent addition of GMTrade into our data set, the volume in this category becomes significant enough to track. The Solana perp DEX's FX perpetual futures volume makes up the lion's share of the numbers you see here: $2.07B in the most recent week, out of $2.13B total.

Perpetual futures on the new SK Hynix ADR (SKHY) did significant volume in their first full week, but were still outpaced by perps based on the S. Korea-traded shares, represented here as SKHYNIX. The new ADRs are still trading at a hefty premium to the underlying shares on the KRX. 

Another notable, from the bottom of this chart: The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) fell out of the top 10 traded assets after three consecutive weeks there, when its weekly volume dropped below $3B.

Trade[XYZ] and Lighter both listed pre-IPO shares in ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), though XYZ was first to market and took the lion's share of the liquidity for Hyperliquid. The dynamic random-access memory chipmaker is scheduled to list in Shanghai on July 27, despite muted institutional demand relative to recent China IPOs, amid a global chip-stock selloff. 

Bybit scored a win, being the first to list MARA Holdings, a US digital asset technology and cryptocurrency mining company in the midst of a pivot to AI infrastructure.

This issue covers the week ending July 19, and draws on volume data from Aster, Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Coinbase International, Crypto.com, EdgeX, GMTrade, Grvt, Kraken, Lighter, OKX, Ondo Perps, Orderly, and Trade[XYZ] on Hyperliquid.

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