ARK’s Valente Sees RWA Trading Reshaping DeFi Platform Economics

Specialized RWA Venues Could Reshape Onchain Liquidity

Real-world asset (RWA) growth is changing how trading venues compete for liquidity and economic influence across decentralized finance (DeFi). In comments provided exclusively to Bitcoin.com News, ARK Invest Director of Research for Digital Assets Lorenzo Valente examined whether expanding RWA-linked derivatives markets will remain concentrated on crypto-native trading venues.

Winning crypto trading historically required bitcoin and major layer-1 liquidity, which attracted professional traders and supported deeper markets. New platforms consequently faced direct competition from established exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase.

Valente summarized the competitive change facing emerging onchain venues and established cryptocurrency exchanges:

“You can now build large onchain outcomes and primitives with essentially zero BTC/ETH market share by specializing in RWAs instead.”

He pointed to Trade.xyz as the clearest example and Robinhood chain as another possibility. Rather than concentrating alongside crypto-native activity, RWA liquidity could “fragment by asset class,” allowing different venues to lead separate categories, he explained.

Those remarks followed a July 23 post on X, where he wrote, “We are entering a new era for DeFi.” The post referenced Blockworks data showing RWAs accounted for 54% of Hyperliquid’s weekly volume, surpassing cryptocurrencies for the first time.

Within that breakdown, individual equities made up 61% of RWA activity after overtaking indices and commodities in June on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 builder-deployed perpetual markets. Across decentralized exchanges, total perpetual volume reached $79 billion for the week, with $50 billion on Hyperliquid, including $26 billion from HIP-3 perpetuals linked to real-world assets.

Order Flow Could Give Trade.xyz Greater Fee Leverage

Continued growth by Trade.xyz could change its commercial relationship with Hyperliquid if the application becomes the exchange’s primary source of activity.

Fee allocation creates tension at several levels of the blockchain stack. Market participants must determine how value is divided between L2 and L1 networks, applications and host chains, and brokers or builder code and primary exchanges.

Valente addressed the effect concentrated order flow could have on the economic relationship between Trade.xyz and Hyperliquid:

“If trade.xyz grows to 90% of Hyperliquid volume, which I see as very possible, I don’t see why they wouldn’t demand a larger share of the overall user fee.”

Although Valente noted that “leaving Hyperliquid entirely is a separate question,” he anticipates negotiations over the economics once the application gains sufficient influence.

Independent Chains Are Likely to Suit Only a Minority of Apps

Pump.fun presents the same fee-allocation tension between an application and its underlying infrastructure. Valente views customer acquisition as the platform’s current priority and considers a Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) fork an unnecessary distraction while the existing model continues producing more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue.

Operating an independent network would increase control over execution, fees, and product design, he described. It would also require additional engineering resources and expose the application to migration risks that do not exist while it remains integrated with Solana.

Valente framed the decision around “what is the app’s opportunity cost” and “how easily can it fork the infra without losing its users?” User retention ultimately determines whether technical independence remains commercially viable.

The ARK Invest research director outlined the threshold an application would need to cross before operating its own chain:

“The most popular apps launching their own chains is one possible answer, but it only makes sense once an app’s fee bill exceeds the value of the liquidity, users, and security it’s renting. Some will get there, most won’t.”

The broader debate, which Valente calls “the million dollar question for the industry,” centers on L1 monetization power, the durability of network effects, and whether applications are paying the right price for blockspace and distribution.