I came across this and I honestly can’t wrap my head around it.
Hyperliquid, a crypto DEX that hardly anyone in India even talks about, apparently did $330 billion in trading volume in July. Robinhood, with its massive 26 million users, did $237 billion.
Here’s the crazy part Hyperliquid only has around 5 lakh users. That means the average activity per user is insanely high compared to Robinhood (like $6 lakh per user vs just $9k).
If you look at Indian brokers, monthly volumes are nowhere close just a few billion here and there spread across crores of accounts. And then this random DEX comes out of nowhere and beats Robinhood?
I don’t know if this is just some crypto frenzy or if this is actually where the future of trading is heading. What do you guys think?
Perpetual swaps with leverage allow us to generate high volumes. No TradFi has perps.
If perps were introduced in Zerodha, the volume would 10x, but most people will lose a lot of money.
Perpetual swaps on crypto platforms offer leverage up to 100x, much higher leverage than what is available with traditional futures. This leads to more traded volume, while the underlying spot value might be much less. Eg - A person with 1L in funds can generate maybe 12L volume on traditional finance in 1 trade, but they can generate 1.9cr volume in 1 trade on hyperliquid (instant opening and closing a 100x leverage trade).
Also, perps encourage more frequent trading since they never expire and are always available, leading to more volume.
Futures, as far as I understand, are used more for longer-term, multi-day bets, leading to less trading volume.
