Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says he’s drastically shortened his timetable for when traditional finance shifts onchain after watching investors flock to crypto platforms such as Hyperliquid to trade tokenized assets during the US–Israel strike on Iran.
In a memo titled “The weekend that changed finance,” Hougan said Hyperliquid became the focal point for trading real-world assets — including crude oil and tokenized gold — while major stock exchanges were closed after the first attack around 03:30 UTC on Saturday. “For most of Sunday, onchain finance was the center of the financial world,” he wrote, adding that he had previously expected a five- to ten-year transition but now thinks it will happen much faster. He noted that blockchain’s 24/7 trading rails make stock exchanges and T+1 settlement look archaic.
Much of the weekend’s real-world-asset trading activity concentrated on Hyperliquid, which logged over $11.5 billion in trading volume across Saturday and Sunday. Hougan said Bloomberg cited Hyperliquid’s crude oil contract as the most relevant price when covering how crude responded to the bombing. Tether’s tokenized gold product XAUt also saw a 24-hour volume spike above $300 million, and prediction market volumes on Kalshi and Polymarket rose as well.
Separately, the New York Stock Exchange and its parent Intercontinental Exchange said in January they are developing a blockchain post-trade system to enable 24/7 trading and instant settlement of stocks and ETFs, with multi-chain support and custody features. The firms did not provide a launch timeline or specify which blockchains or permission models the platform will use.
For now, Hougan said hedge funds, banks and other investors that want to trade competitively have little choice but to set up stablecoin wallets and learn to trade on crypto perpetuals platforms like Hyperliquid.
