Bitwise: TradFi Will Shift to 24/7 Crypto Rails Sooner Than Expected

Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan said he drastically cut his estimate of when on-chain finance would take off after investors piled into crypto platforms such as Hyperliquid during the US‑Israel attack on Iran. Hougan said that for most of Sunday onchain finance was the center of the financial world.

He had expected traditional markets to take five to 10 years to move onchain but now says the change will come much sooner, adding that blockchain's 24/7 trading rails make stock exchanges and T+1 settlement look archaic. Much of the weekend real-world-asset trading occurred on Hyperliquid, which saw over $11.5 billion in trading volume across Saturday and Sunday.

Hougan noted that when Bloomberg sought a price for how crude oil responded to the bombing, it cited the Hyperliquid crude oil contract as the most relevant. Tether's tokenized gold product, Tether Gold (XAUt), saw 24-hour trading volume spike to over $300 million, and prediction market volumes on Kalshi and Polymarket also rose.

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