RWA perpetual contracts reached 52% of weekly trading volume on Hyperliquid, overtaking crypto-native trading for the first time and becoming the dominant use case on decentralized exchanges. Onchain data shows RWA perps recorded $25.1B in Q3 2026, with roughly $1B traded per day. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid’s cumulative protocol revenue topped $1.4B, with over $1.26B used to buy back HYPE on the open market, giving the platform more than 56% of onchain perp market share by open interest.

The tokenized US Treasury market crossed $10.8B in total market capitalization, adding more than $1B this year. Circle’s USYC reached $2.41B to become the largest single tokenized Treasury fund, edging past Ondo’s USDY ($2.3B) and BlackRock’s BUIDL ($2.25B). Token Terminal data shows the broader tokenized fund market has grown to $35.1B (11.7x in three years), with Treasury funds up 47x to $13.9B — yet only 8.9% of tokenized fund capital sits in DeFi protocols.

DTCC entered commercial operation on its tokenization platform in October 2026, launching with US Treasury securities on a dual-chain architecture spanning Canton Network and LFDT Besu. As the settlement backbone for most of the US securities market, DTCC’s shift from pilot to production forces every custodian, broker and asset manager to decide how and when to connect. Around the same time, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman said at TOKEN2049 that tokenizing Treasuries, equities and money market funds could unlock “tens of billions of dollars” in capital currently trapped as collateral.

On October 5, the CFTC released an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking covering Regulation CTX (crypto asset transactions) and Regulation CAM (crypto asset markets), seeking comment on a federal framework for retail crypto commodity trading and baking in FTX-era lessons on customer fund segregation and proof of reserves. Meanwhile, the SEC’s Regulation Crypto Assets proposal heads into its final comment stretch before the October 20 deadline, running alongside the temporary exemption for tokenized securities venues issued in September.

Institutional-grade RWA infrastructure landed within a single week: Ripple Custody integrated the Canton Network, XRPL activated PermissionDelegation for delegated institutional account management, and Chainlink launched CCIP Vault Adapters supporting 80+ chains. Together these upgrades let institutions custody permissioned assets, delegate compliance roles and deposit into vaults across chains within days, consolidating previously fragmented processes into standardized rails.