RWA Chains Grow More Diverse; OpenSea Returns

RWA Chain Diversity

• As market cap for RWAs grows, where these assets live becomes increasingly competitive. Ethereum was and continues to be the most dominant chain for RWAs, commanding over 40% of the market cap today.
  • However, Ethereum’s market share is actually down nearly 30 percentage points from a year ago, when it held nearly three-quarters of the market.
• Other competing chains like Solana, BNB, Stellar, and Avalanche have all carved up Ethereum’s position, each gaining 6 percentage points on average in the last 12 months.
  • This diversity supports competition and is likely to continue as RWAs compete. Because tokenization has minimal fees, competition comes down to distribution and adoption. Partnerships with different blockchains to distribute your assets and build integrations are speeding up as more companies look to enter.
  • One caveat to remember: it is not enough to simply have the largest market capitalization. Without people actually trading, borrowing, or lending the shares, there’s little real adoption.
• Despite tokenized stock market capitalization surging past $3 billion, only about 10% is actively used in DeFi. As regulators worldwide provide more clarity on tokenizing stocks, adoption of tokenized equities across DeFi venues will continue.

Returning to (Open)Sea

• What remains of the NFT ecosystem continues to dwindle, with Blur, the second-largest marketplace, announcing it will wind down services.
  • Once the largest NFT marketplace, the platform introduced an infamous NFT lending-borrowing feature that drove both volume and liquidations. The novel lending features assumed blue-chip collections would maintain sufficient liquidity and value, but volatility quickly drove liquidation cascades as liquidity remained thin.
  • Blur’s incentives drove significant volume in its early days, reaching $1.4 billion monthly volumes at its peak, but it failed to generate enough sustainable revenue to continue operating. This shows how hard it is to convert incentivized volume into sustainable growth once incentives fade.
• The shutdown comes as OpenSea, the largest platform, has been steadily regaining market share over the last few years. OpenSea hovers around 70% of the volume, while 30% still goes through Blur.
  • Monthly volumes have trickled down to $10s of millions, with only Blur and OpenSea processing any meaningful trades.
  • Despite OpenSea gaining market share, the total volume has dropped to critical levels.
• Blur’s shutdown comes as several other projects shut down, including Blast, the layer-2 from the same founder.
  • Speculative capital contracts quickly when incentives and volume weaken. Building a sustainable revenue stream while having sufficient incentives for new capital will be key to creating ecosystems that survive poor market conditions.

Building Blocks

• Deal counts for crypto VC have continued to struggle, with October set to put in another low. However, despite the low deal count, it’s interesting which categories of projects are getting funded.
  • Deals in financial services, DeFi, trading, and infrastructure have gained market share. An increasing number of deals focus on consumer access, better decentralized applications, and trading.
  • Some of the largest deals this year include prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, exchanges Crypto.com and Kraken, and financial services firms Rain and Circle.
• Notably absent are more speculative categories such as Web3, NFTs, and data. These categories generally perform well in strong trending markets when onchain speculative capital is abundant.
  • As VC biomes become more selective, average deal size has risen; greater capital concentration means fewer deals and more capital flowing to each one.
  • Traditional finance has also increased its participation in crypto venture deals. Often investing in complementary businesses, TradFi has helped to cement leading platforms and integrate more closely with existing infrastructure.
• Concentrating capital in later-stage companies can weaken the pipeline of new companies and ventures. Fewer early-stage projects that are experimenting with crypto are attracting financing, which may force teams to be more selective in the products they build and focus more attention on sustainability without the need for external capital.

Burj Kha-fee-fa

• Robinhood Chain generated just ~$52K in fees last Friday, down ~99% from the $8.2 million single-day record from just a month ago.
  • Throughout its record-setting week, the chain generated $28.5 million in fees. Last week, it generated just ~$306K.
  • In an even more jarring comparison, the whole of September saw $40.8 million in fees, while October so far has generated just $920K.
  • Robinhood Chain’s fee chart now resembles the “Burj Khalifa” building, a near-vertical climb from ~$55K per day in late August to $8.2 million in under two weeks, followed by a steep descent and a long flat spire at pre-spike levels.
• Despite the steep decline in chain fees, activity and capital have fallen considerably less in comparison.
  • Last week’s DEX volume is down ~60% from the record week, while stablecoin supply within the chain is still hovering near record highs of over $1 billion.
  • This implies that capital stayed while the fee-paying activity left.
  • Robinhood Chain now earns roughly $50K a day on ~$1 billion of weekday DEX volume.
  • Any renewed surge on Pons, the chain’s leading token launchpad, will show up in fee per transaction well before it shows up in transaction count.

A Perp Above

• Open interest (OI) in Kalshi perps hit a record $65.6 million last Wednesday, currently sitting at $51 million.
  • Kalshi perps’ OI is up over 154% since September 1st, and 92% month-to-date.
  • Non-crypto markets, which include stocks and commodities, made up roughly 23% of OI.
  • The OI growth Kalshi perps have been experiencing is coming from breadth as much as depth, with perp listings of palladium, platinum, aluminum, copper, and the US500, as well as USTECH100 and WTI crude on the day OI set its record.
• Interestingly, despite non-crypto markets making up 23% of Kalshi perps’ OI, they only make up 9.4% of October volume.
  • BTC and ETH still drive the majority of volume, implying commodity and index traders are holding positions for relatively longer, which makes for stickier OI than crypto flow alone.
• In terms of trading volume, Kalshi perps saw over $27.3 billion in the month of September, up 79% MoM.
  • On the other hand, Polymarket perps volume fell to ~$357 million in the week ending October 10, its lowest weekly total since mid-May 2026.
  • Comparing the first half of October with the first half of September shows total Polymarket volume falling by 31%.
  • Within that, commodity volume fell 73%, equity volume fell 57%, while crypto volume was the only category to grow, by 40%.
  • In simple terms, Polymarket perps’ non-crypto categories, the same ones Kalshi has been listing into, are emptying.