I recently joined Ventuals as an advisor to help bring Pre-IPO Perps to life.
My hot take is that PERPS, not tokenized spot, is the real gateway to bringing RWAs onchain. Here's why: 🧵
1/ When people hear RWAs, they think tokenization.
Wrapped stocks. onchain treasuries. tokenized commodities. But what if the FIRST phase of bringing RWAs onchain isn’t wrapping them, but abstracting them?
2/ Tokenization tries to replicate TradFi onchain with wrappers, custodians, and legal sync. SKEUMORPHIC AF.
There’s a simpler crypto-native primitive that already works, scales, and fits how traders behave: Perps.
3/ Perps are crypto’s most original financial innovation.
• Simple directional bets
• Built-in leverage
• No expiry
• 24/7 access
• Infinite float
They've alr eaten crypto volume. RWAs are next.
4/ Infinite float = unlimited synthetic exposure w/o needing to source the real asset
Whereas, tokenized spot is bottlenecked by:
• Real-world supply (requires fronting capital w/ choppy mints and redeems)
• Ops overhead (reg issuers, licensed custodians, SPVs + compliance)
5/ With @HyperliquidX HIP-3, perps will be the default listing engine by launching fast with Day 0 deep liq and global access.
No wrappers, no banks, no coordination.
Tokenization will feel redundant until the ledger of record itself becomes onchain... and that's far far away
6/ Want to trade $1B of AAPL?
You don’t need to source $1B of AAPL stock. you just need $1B worth of longs and shorts.
Perps scale with trading demand, not underlying supply.
7/ Most RWAs aren’t assets people want to hold. Traders don’t care about dividends, transferability or voting at AGMs. They just want to trade.
10x long S&P. short Tesla. Swing oil on CPI. Bet on rates.
8/ Perps are also structurally simpler
All you need is:
a) Matching engine
b) Funding rate mechanism
c) Real-time spot index
9/ We will get to mature tokenized RWAs, but that’s the endgame.
This is the REAL sequencing:
1. Perpification — synthetic access and infinite float
2. Tokenization — wrappers and bridges
3. Birth-onchain — native issuance and settlement
10/ Perps do face risk during after-hours.
Stale or thin pricing can distort funding, liquidations, and oracles.
But we can mitigate these risks with modified funding rates, implied indexes, or confidence-weight oracles.
FIN/ Perps aren’t just a better trading primitive. They are how RWAs will come onchain.
No custody risks, no compliance drag, no waiting on Wall Street: just infinite synthetic access spun up permissionlessly at the speed of demand.
It’s not a leverage gimmick secondary to tokenization. It is the starting point.
PERPIFY EVERYTHING. Hyperliquid.
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