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RWA perps just had their biggest quarter on record by a wide margin. $524.8 billion in total trading volume in Q1 2026 alone. More than the entire year of 2025, which itself recorded $313 billion. Four consecutive quarters of growth, accelerating each time. > Q1 2025: $29.7B → Q2: $67.4B → Q3: $77B → Q4: $138.9B → Q1 2026: $524.8B > Daily open interest jumped from $140M to $6.68B over fifteen months. > Tokenized stocks spot volume hit $15.1B in Q1 2026, overtaking all of H2 2025 in a single quarter. > Tokenized gold spot trading reached $90.7B in Q1 alone, surpassing the entire 2025 total. . . The tokenization narrative was built around custody. Bring the asset on-chain, hold it, earn the underlying yield. The market didn't stop there. Perpetuals, structured positions, yield through execution — Q1 2026 shows capital looking for ways to run strategies on top of these assets, not just hold them. Allocators are no longer asking whether tokenized RWAs belong in a portfolio. They're asking who can actually run them. Smart money tracked the open interest curve, not the market cap headline. A 47x increase in daily OI over fifteen months signals a structural shift in how capital intends to use these assets. Source in 🧵