In crypto circles, Hyperliquid was among the breakout protocols of 2025. But it wasn’t until this year that it started getting mainstream attention. The Wall Street Journal said Hyperliquid was “Emerging as Wall Street’s Convenience Store” because it was “always open for business.” 

The reason? So-called real-world assets, a category that includes tokenized equities, indices, and commodities. 

When the US and Israel began bombing Iran in February, traders flocked to Hyperliquid to place weekend trades on oil. In March, its users began trading S&P-licensed perpetual futures contracts. 

All of this raises a question: Hyperliquid’s embrace of real-world assets has earned it mainstream coverage and high-profile partnerships, but has it led to meaningful growth in users and, most importantly, revenue? 

It’s a mixed bag, according to our analysis. 

Hyperliquid’s embrace of real-world assets is a bottom-up phenomenon. A 2025 upgrade allowed users to launch their own markets, provided they meet certain requirements. 

Users began spinning up markets in tokenized equities and commodities. But it wasn’t until the war in Iran that people took note — the first bombs were dropped on a Saturday, when traditional markets are closed. Traders knew it would rock the world’s oil markets. Hyperliquid was one of the few venues where they could place bets on the size of the proverbial earthquake. 

An analysis of DefiLlama data shows that Hyperliquid’s real-world asset markets have indeed attracted new users, rather than merely giving existing users a new asset to trade. 

Nearly one-third of Hyperliquid’s new users in the first half of 2026 placed their first trade on a real-world asset market, according to DefiLlama data. Between January and June, more than 534,000 new wallets placed trades on Hyperliquid. Of those, more than 169,000, or 31.7%, executed their first trade on an RWA market. The other 365,000 placed their first trades on other markets.

Those users don’t just come for real-world asset markets. They stay for them, too. Of the $111.6 billion in trading volume those users generated, $93.2 billion — 83.6% — was executed on RWA markets. Just $18.3 billion was traded across crypto perpetuals and other markets. 

But what good are all those new users? Have they led to a similar increase in revenue? 

As mentioned earlier, the users who were lured by real-world asset markets generated about $111.6 billion in trading volume. That represents 31.5% of the $354.2 billion traded by all new users in the first half of 2026. 

So far so good, right? 

Well, no. Those users generated a measly $34.1 million in fees between January and June. All of the new users in that span paid $412.6 million in fees. That means the real-world asset crowd — one third of all new users, one third of all new volume — was responsible for just 8.3% of the protocol’s revenue in the first half of 2026. 

So what gives? Well, without per-trade granularity, it’s impossible to say. But there are a few possible explanations. First, the wallets focused on real-world assets may trade more passively as makers (0.015%) rather than takers (0.045%). Alternatively, the two cohorts may fall into different fee tiers due to staking or differences in their 14-day rolling trading volumes.

In short, real-world asset markets are not yet a meaningful driver of fee generation for Hyperliquid, despite all their buzz. More than four-fifths of all fees generated by new users originate from wallets that came to trade crypto and that continue to trade crypto. 

Read the full DefiLlama Research article for the complete cohort analysis, fee breakdown, and methodology.

New chains, bridges, lending markets, perps, vaults, all stacking on top of one another. Every line of code becomes another set of dependencies.

Reviewing that code has never scaled as quickly as writing it.

And with the release of Anthropic's Mythos, a renewed worry: If AI can reason about software at a level better than the most experienced security researchers, will attackers use it to discover vulnerabilities faster than defenders can eliminate them? Or can AI help defend the onchain financial system at scale?

Find out if and how "AI is changing the economics of security".

LlamaPay streams salaries in real time, handles token vesting with zero admin keys, and counts Arbitrum, Curve, and CoW Swap as flagship users.

Find out more about why you should onboard your web3 company into the new age of payroll.