RWA futures were 15.2% of CEX volume in July, not overtaking crypto

RWA futures "overtook" crypto futures in July only in a single venue-versus-venue comparison, not across the wider derivatives market. An OKX and Token Terminal report, tracking July 1 to July 30, put trade.xyz's RWA-contract volume at $107.6 billion against $105.7 billion of crypto-perpetual volume on Hyperliquid. CoinDesk Research's centralised-exchange dataset for the same month put RWA perpetuals at $460 billion against $3.03 trillion of total CEX derivatives, a 15.2% share.

The OKX and Token Terminal report treated trade.xyz and Hyperliquid as category-leading onchain venues. Across nine fully collected decentralised exchanges, RWA contracts stayed below 20% of volume. The selected RWA series in the report climbed from $760 million in October 2025 to $107.6 billion in July, and open interest on the same series rose from $16.1 million to $1.72 billion over nine months.

Where the denominator shifted

Adding Hyperliquid's HIP-3 venue group, which traded almost exclusively RWA contracts, as a tenth venue pushed the measured RWA share above 50% on July 8. HIP-3 activity in that dataset was more than 99% RWA, while Hyperliquid's main crypto-perpetual book was excluded from the calculation. The choice of which venues count, not the underlying RWA growth, flipped the result.

What a like-for-like comparison looks like

The CEX breakdown is the closest to a clean split: $460 billion of RWA perpetuals against $3.03 trillion of total CEX derivatives, per CoinDesk Research. A CoinMarketCap Research tally across 19 centralised and decentralised venues reached $792.2 billion of RWA-perpetual volume for July, with no equivalent all-crypto denominator published alongside it. The OKX and Token Terminal page carries conflicting fold-change labels, so the endpoints are more reliable than any single multiplier attached to the growth.