The Evolution of RWA Trading Onchain: Variational Swaps
RWA perp volume went from under $1 billion in October 2025 to over $120 billion in August. How Variational swaps compare with perps on funding and execution cost.
Perp DEX & Onchain Trading Research
Castle Labs covers perpetual futures and onchain trading from the order book up. Our October 2026 report, Mapping the Perpetual Trading Ecosystem, compares Hyperliquid, Lighter, Variational, TradeXYZ, Ondo, QFEX, edgeX, Extended, Pacifica, GMX and Jupiter on design, liquidation backstops, token value accrual, turnover and take rate, then tests execution cost, depth, funding and index quality against Binance, Bybit and OKX with live order-book data. The same lane covers RWA and pre-IPO perps, options, funding-rate markets, prediction markets and our tick-by-tick comparison of Hyperliquid oil perps with CME WTI futures.
$80.1M
commodity perp volume (24h)
$961.1M
commodity open interest
$322.8M
all Trade XYZ volume (24h)
$383.7M
prediction market TVL
$75.2M
onchain options volume (30d)
$344.2M
Polymarket International TVL
Sources: Hyperliquid Info API (2026-11-01), DeFiLlama prediction markets (2026-11-01), DeFiLlama options volume (2026-11-01).
Live data · updated daily
Perp DEX Rankings
Onchain perp venues by open interest and 24h volume, with a Binance comparison
Live data · updated daily
Hyperliquid Revenue
Hyperliquid's daily, weekly, monthly and 12-month revenue, its sources and the HIP-3 share
Live data · updated daily
Bitcoin $100K Odds
The chance Bitcoin reaches $100K by year-end, from Deribit options and Polymarket, with the implied price range
Flagship Research
October 2026
Mapping the Perpetual Trading Ecosystem
A comparative analysis of perp trading venues across design, GTM and microstructure
March 2026
The Evolution of Commodities
State of Commodities and a Quantitative Analysis of the Growth of these Markets Onchain
July 2026
The Renaissance of Onchain Options
Mapping the expansion of options as a trading instrument and the volatility that prices them
Start Here
432 Hours of Hyperliquid Oil Market Data: A Microstructure Comparison with CME WTI Futures
Hyperliquid's CL oil perp vs CME WTI futures over 432 hours: CME shows 125x more depth at 2 bps, and median trades differ 166x, $90,450 vs $543.
Hyperliquid is Not a Company
Key takeaways from Jeff's interview on Hyperliquid: the HYPE airdrop, why there is no discretionary buyback program, HIP-3 markets and TradeXYZ's silver volume.
Questions Covered
Which perp DEX leads the market?
Hyperliquid held over 56% of onchain perp open interest in September 2026, followed by Aster (9.7%), Variational (6.2%) and Lighter (5.7%). Onchain venues now handle over 13% of all perp volume, up from 4% in 2024.
Are onchain perps cheaper than centralised exchanges?
For crypto majors, often yes once fees are counted. In our September 2026 test at $100,000, Hyperliquid was 1% to 24% cheaper to trade than the Binance, Bybit and OKX median across BTC, ETH, SOL, ZEC and HYPE, and Lighter was over 60% cheaper because it charges no taker fee.
How are RWA perps different from crypto perps?
RWA perps reference markets that close. Venues handle off-hours with discovery bounds, internal order-book pricing or hard price limits, so on weekends venue indices can diverge by up to 30 bps and funding can become the main cost of holding. RWA perps reached $123 billion in volume in August 2026.
How are onchain options changing?
The research covers order books, AMMs, perpetual options, short-dated binaries, volatility surfaces, and the overlap between options and prediction markets.
Why do funding-rate markets matter?
Funding-rate products separate the cost of holding perpetual exposure from the asset price itself, giving traders a direct market for rates, basis, and relative-value strategies.
Latest Trading Research
Showing 1-12 of 19 articles
Page 1 / 2
·Deep DivesTrading
Metric: The Next-Gen DEX
Liquidity Providers (LPs) on Decentralised Exchanges (DEXs) have long faced a structural problem during market movements: as prices move on Centralised Exchanges (CEXs), which are hubs for spot liquidity and perform price discovery, DEXs still quote prices before the market moves, giving arbitrageur
Read more
·Deep DivesTrading
Onchain Perps: A Study of the Evolution of Design Choices and Growth Catalysts
This excerpt is from our research on Mapping the Perpetual Trading Ecosystem: A Comparative Analysis of Perp Trading Venues across Design, GTM and Microstructure, highlighting the perp ecosystem, including the key growth enablers, the architecture on which the protocols are built, and the GTM strate
Read more
·Deep DivesOptions
Mapping Onchain Options: Exchanges, Binaries and Yield Products
Onchain options in three families: Derive and Paradex order books, binary markets on Polymarket, Kalshi and HIP-4, and option yield products from Rysk and Hegic.
Read more
·OptionsDeep Dives
Prediction markets as option-like instruments
Prediction markets work like binary options, down to 300-second expiries. How Polymarket, Kalshi and Hyperliquid binaries compare as option-like instruments.
Read more
·OptionsMarkets
Options from a Builder’s Perspective
A Gap Analysis with Interviews from Rysk, Derive, Panoptic, and GammaSwap.
Read more
·OptionsDeep Dives
The Rebirth of Onchain Options: An Ecosystem View
Options traded over 4x the contracts of futures in 2024. How onchain options moved past DOVs to order books, AMMs, perpetual options and short-dated binaries.
Read more
·L2sDeep Dives
propAMMs: Better than CEX?
How propAMMs differ from passive x*y=k AMMs, why their fills on Solana landed 0.33 to 1.36 bps from the best CEX mid, and how the model is growing on Ethereum.
Read more
·OptionsTrading
Don’t Trade Cryptos, Trade Rates: A Boros Funding Rates Primer
Castle Labs research on Boros, Pendle’s yield-trading platform for funding rates, covering Yield Units, hedging use cases, vaults, liquidity, and power-user strategies.
Read more
·TradingMarkets
Making All Markets Hyperliquid
How HIP-4 brings binary prediction markets to Hyperliquid, challenging Kalshi and Polymarket, and how much HYPE buyback revenue it could add at 3 to 4 bps fees.
Read more
·TradingMarkets
The Almanak Strategy Builder: How to create your own strategy with the help of an AI swarm
How Almanak's Strategy Builder uses an AI agent swarm to turn ideas into deterministic, verifiable trading code, tested by building a Pendle RSI strategy.
Read more
·TradingDeFi
USDH: A Hyperliquid Aligned Stablecoin
USDH proposals compared: Paxos, Frax, Native Markets, Agora, Sky, Ethena and others bid for Hyperliquid's native stablecoin, as 95% of its $5.8B supply is USDC.
Read more
·AIMarkets
The AI Dispatch #27 - Same Old, $REI Network, Hyperliquid AI?
Crypto AI weekly: Theoriq and Almanak raise via Kaito and Legion, and how Rei Network's Core synthetic brain tackles LLM memory, stale data and hallucinations.
Read more
Research for your market
Castle works with protocols, investors, and market teams on category research, competitive analysis, and distribution.