Real-world asset (RWA) trading is emerging as a powerful force in decentralized finance, and ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente believes it could fundamentally change how DeFi platforms compete for liquidity, users, and revenue.
The shift is already visible on Hyperliquid. During one week in July, RWA markets generated more than half of the platform’s trading volume for the first time, with tokenized equities becoming a particularly important source of activity. ARK’s latest research also shows the broader RWA market continuing to expand, reaching roughly $32 billion by June 2026—about four times its size at the beginning of 2025.
Valente’s bigger argument is that DeFi may no longer be defined primarily by crypto-native assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Historically, exchanges needed deep BTC and ETH liquidity to attract traders, creating strong network effects around the largest crypto pairs. But specialized RWA platforms could challenge that model by attracting users through stocks, commodities, Treasuries and other traditional assets brought on-chain.
“RWA liquidity could fragment by asset class,” Valente argues. In this scenario, a platform could become dominant in a particular market without controlling a large share of BTC or ETH trading.
That has major implications for DeFi economics. Applications that control a large percentage of user activity and order flow could gain more negotiating power over the fees they share with the underlying blockchain. Valente suggests that if an application such as Trade.xyz were to generate the overwhelming majority of a network’s volume, it could potentially demand a larger portion of user fees.
This also raises an important question about whether successful DeFi applications will eventually launch their own blockchains. Valente believes only the biggest applications are likely to do so. The economic case becomes compelling only when the fees paid for infrastructure exceed the value of the liquidity, users and security that the application receives from its host network. For most applications, shared infrastructure will remain more efficient.
What Could It Mean for BTC and Other Cryptos?
The rise of RWA trading does not necessarily mean Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies will lose value. Instead, it could change their role within the DeFi ecosystem.
Bitcoin remains the largest and most established crypto asset, while Ethereum and Solana continue to provide major infrastructure for decentralized applications. However, if traders increasingly enter DeFi to trade tokenized stocks, commodities or credit products, exchanges may become less dependent on BTC, ETH and SOL liquidity to generate activity.
That could create both competition and opportunity. Crypto-native assets may face a smaller share of attention on some venues, while blockchains capable of efficiently supporting RWA settlement, stablecoins and high-volume trading could benefit from increased adoption.
For HYPE, Ethereum, Solana and other infrastructure-linked tokens, the key question may therefore become how much economic value their networks capture from growing RWA activity. For BTC, the impact is likely to be more indirect: Bitcoin could remain the industry's primary reserve and liquidity asset even as a growing portion of on-chain trading shifts toward tokenized traditional markets.
The broader message from Valente is clear: DeFi's next competitive battle may not be about who trades the most crypto. It could be about who controls the largest and most valuable flows of assets—whether those assets originated on a blockchain or in traditional financial markets.
