a16z crypto says blockchain’s real breakthrough is not just making trading more efficient. In Robbie Petersen’s article, translated by TechFlow, the larger shift is on the supply side of markets: who can create a market, who can list it, and how broadly it can be distributed.
The argument starts with a simple definition. Markets transfer risk. Every trade is an agreement between two counterparties to move a specific risk exposure at a given price. The article breaks that idea into two dimensions: the underlying exposure, such as a company’s cash flow, a barrel of oil, an election result, a borrower’s credit, or a GPU hour; and the instrument used to move that exposure, including spot, dated futures, perpetual futures, options, and event contracts.
Financial innovation usually moved one step at a time
The piece argues that most of financial history has been a story of slow innovation, usually along only one dimension at a time. Spot grain markets existed for thousands of years, but grain futures were not listed in Chicago until 1865. Currencies floated in 1971, and futures followed in 1972. Equity options existed in bespoke dealer form for centuries, but only became listed markets after the Chicago Board Options Exchange and Black-Scholes arrived in 1973. Exchange-traded funds did not appear until 1993.
New categories of risk exposure were even rarer. Interest rates were not broadly traded until 1981. Default risk had to wait until the 1994 arrival of credit default swaps. Volatility did not become a listed market until VIX derivatives in 2004. Event outcomes only became true markets in recent years through prediction platforms.
Demand was there. Supply was the bottleneck
The article says these markets did not fail to emerge because nobody wanted them. Farmers wanted to hedge harvests long before the Chicago Board of Trade. Creditors wanted to transfer default risk before CDS existed. What slowed expansion, Petersen writes, was supply.
He points to two longstanding constraints: listing committees and legal frameworks, and geographic fragmentation. Blockchain, in his view, removes both at once. Issuance can happen without permission, and distribution can happen globally from the start. That is why he calls blockchain the first technology that lets market supply catch up with global latent demand.
The article says the thesis already shows up in crypto. Many of the sector’s category-defining outcomes, from perpetual futures and decentralized spot exchanges to prediction markets, lending markets, memecoins, NFTs, and tokenized real-world assets, flowed to the entities that controlled issuance rights, trading rights, or both for entirely new onchain markets.
Crypto creates new exposures and new transfer mechanisms
Petersen groups crypto market design into two buckets. Some products create new classes of risk exposure. Others create new ways to transfer risk that already existed.
On the exposure side, the article says crypto has engineered financial expression for risks that previously had little or no market form. Prediction markets trace back to the Iowa Electronic Markets, but found product-market fit onchain and turned discrete events such as elections, Federal Reserve decisions, and court rulings into tradable underlyings. Peer-to-peer lending markets turned personal credit relationships into assets with real-time continuous pricing. Pre-listing markets opened exposures that had been dominated by a small set of secondary brokers. Even memecoins and NFTs, the article argues, transformed abstract risks such as attention flows and cultural relevance into readable, tradable markets.
On the mechanism side, crypto created or expanded ways to move those exposures. Automated market makers let a market exist before any market maker agreed to quote it. Perpetual futures were first proposed in 1993, but found product-market fit onchain by compressing fragmented, dated exposure into a single contract balanced by funding rates. Binary contracts converted event outcomes into a market that settles at either $1 or zero. Pool-based lending replaced bilateral loans with shared pools and utilization curves. Bonding curves merged issuance with price discovery so an asset could have a market from the very first buyer.
The article also makes room for a downside. Permissionless issuance creates a lot of noise because listing filters are removed. But Petersen says that is not the central issue. The point is not that every new market is good. The point is that the market itself, rather than a committee, becomes the self-selection mechanism that decides which markets survive.
Perpetual futures are presented as the clearest proof
No instrument captures the thesis more cleanly than perpetual futures, the article says, and recent growth in onchain trading of non-crypto assets is cited as evidence.
Because perpetuals are synthetic, the listing constraint gets reduced to two requirements: a robust oracle and two traders willing to face each other. If those exist, a leveraged market can be built for almost anything. On that basis, Petersen calls perpetuals one of the most effective coordination mechanisms in financial history.
Using the same logic, the article says Hyperliquid is the closest thing available to a global financial coordination platform. It says HIP-3 and HIP-4 allow users to issue their own derivatives, connect to Hyperliquid’s global front end, and earn revenue from that access. Lower friction in issuing a market means more markets get created, and demand then selects the winners.
RWA perpetual volume is used as a live example
The article says one of the fastest-growing segments in crypto, and increasingly one of the fastest-growing areas in finance more broadly, is permissionless issuance combined with global distribution onchain.
Its headline figure is that in July, onchain RWA perpetual futures volume reached an annualized run rate of $1.4 trillion, accounting for half of Hyperliquid’s book. At a high level, Petersen describes this as existing risks such as stocks, oil, and meme stocks meeting a new transfer tool without permission gates. The recombination, he argues, produced an explosion in downstream volume.
The article also says a different market has taken the lead almost every quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2025, it was U.S. equities and commodities. In the first half of 2026, it was oil, natural gas, and metals. More recently, semiconductors and meme stocks have led. For Petersen, that pattern reflects the same core point: market supply is catching up with whatever the world wants to trade in each period.
Round-the-clock trading is becoming an opening wedge for price discovery
The piece then pushes the argument further. Permissionless 24/7 trading, it says, is becoming an opening wedge for onchain price discovery.
During this year’s oil shock, when CME was closed, WTI found price discovery on trade.xyz, which the article describes as one of the deepest sources of global liquidity. It makes a similar claim for pre-IPO equity markets, saying markets for Cerebras and SpaceX priced upcoming IPOs more accurately than bankers did, with only a very small marginal gap between the final-hour price of pre-listing perpetuals and the actual opening price.
Those examples support a broader conclusion in the article: structural limits in traditional markets, including the lack of 24/7 trading, geographic restrictions, the absence of pre-listing access, and isolated margin systems, are turning into durable advantages for onchain venues.
The addressable market extends to any risk people want to trade
The article ends by widening the frame. Markets move risk exposures. For most of financial history, that process was constrained by geography, listing committees, and legal frameworks. Petersen argues that those constraints are now fading. The addressable market for onchain trading is not limited to the assets that exist today, but includes any risk that any person, or any agent, wants to trade from anywhere.
That view implies another wave of onchain market creation. Some of it will be new ways to transfer old risks, such as commodity and foreign exchange perpetuals, indexes, and around-the-clock equity exposure. Some of it will be entirely new units of risk, including compute futures, perpetuals linked to macro data such as CPI, music, social trends, sports, and anything else an oracle can capture if both longs and shorts are willing to trade it. The applications and protocols that issue those markets, along with the venues where they trade, are described as the places where value will ultimately accrue.
