All figures are through May 2026, the last complete month.
A token is a claim on the asset; a perp is its price exposure
Tokenization puts a claim on the asset onchain. The token is backed one-for-one and carries the economics of what it represents: redemption, yield, dividends. Perpetual futures put only the position onchain. They are cash-settled exposure to a price, marked against an oracle and margined in stablecoins, with no claim on the underlying.
The tokenized commodities pool is mostly gold
Tokenized commodities are about $8B in asset under management, roughly five times more than a year ago. Gold is over 60% of that, and a single token, Tether Gold, is over a third of the total.
Tokenized equities are about $1.6B, up from close to zero a year ago. Ondo Global Markets carries about 70% of the equity AUM, and Backed Finance's xStocks holds the rest.
Equity perps run steady; commodity perps spike on events
On Hyperliquid, the largest perp venue, RWA open interest grew about seven times year-to-date to roughly $2.3B, lifting RWA share from about 3.7% of the book in January to around 24% by the end of May. Crypto is still the majority of the book, but declining.
Equities and commodities are almost the entire RWA book, but their open interest builds on different patterns. Equity is the larger and steadier part, near $1.3B and climbing with volume. Commodities are event-driven: open interest jumped to about $1.5B during the April oil move around the Iran conflict, then fell back to roughly $800M by the end of May, pulled in for a single event and shed once it passed.
Tokens turn over monthly, perps daily
Focusing on equities, the two pools turn over at very different rates. Tokenized equities trade about once a month: daily DEX volume runs near 4.5% of AUM for both major issuers, a velocity of about 0.045. Equity perps trade closer to once a day, with volume near 0.9 to 1.1 times open interest on both Hyperliquid and Ostium, another major perp venue where RWAs are most of the open interest and volume. The ratios use different denominators, AUM for the token and open interest for the perp, and the token figure is an onchain floor, since it counts DEX volume only while most tokenized-stock trading happens offchain.
Either way, the gap still points to two different use cases: the token is bought to hold, the perp to trade.
Both routes go quiet on weekends
Both tokenized stocks and commodities on DEXs and RWA perps see volume fall sharply on weekends. This is because the oracle feed that prices these instruments stops updating when the underlying market closes, market makers cannot hedge in a shut spot market, and primary mint and redeem for the tokens runs only five days a week. Crypto-native markets, whose underlying trades around the clock, show no weekend drop. The weekend gap is a sign that these assets still depend considerably on the regulated venues behind them.
Ondo uses its own tokenized stocks as collateral for its perps
Tokenization and perpification have grown on separate tracks, but they are beginning to converge. Ondo Finance opened Ondo Perps in June: 24/7 perpetuals on US stocks, ETFs, and commodities for non-US users. The novelty is the collateral: a holder can post a tokenized stock it already owns as margin and hedge it with the opposite perp on the same venue. That fuses the two routes in one product, and concentrates the market in a single name worth tracking.
The onchain market is still early, but the institutional build-out is underway
On size alone the onchain commodities and equities market is still fairly small. But traditional institutions are already moving onto the same assets from both directions: CME is listing perpetual-style index futures and ICE is building tokenized NYSE equities. This acceleration has been spurred by swift moves from the SEC and CFTC, which have fixed the legal status of tokenized assets and cleared the first onshore perp.
The build-out is moving onshore, and today's crypto-native venues are a working preview of it. The opportunity is to read that preview early, tracking which assets get traded, how, and where liquidity builds or thins.
Dune has the data to monitor it, across tokenized assets and perpetual venues.
Notable these weeks
- Coinbase moves into tokenized stocks and RWA perps. In a June 16 product update, Coinbase said it will launch tokenized stocks next month for non-US customers, backed 1:1 with dividends and shareholder rights, tradable 24/7 and usable as loan collateral. Alongside them it is adding RWA perpetual futures on thematic equity indices and pre-IPO names.
- The SEC moves on tokenized U.S. stocks. On June 17 the agency signaled it is readying an "innovation exemption" for tokens that mirror U.S. equities, with Coinbase among those planning to launch onshore, while Citadel Securities and SIFMA argue the change should go through formal rulemaking. It's the equity-token step the March SEC-CFTC interpretation left open.
