# Blockchains create net new markets > Blockchains are the first technology that lets the supply of markets catch up with latent global demand. - URL: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/blockchains-create-net-new-markets - Authors: [Robbie Peterson](https://a16zcrypto.com/team/robbie-peterson) - Published: 2026-09-29 - Focus areas: tech trends - Tags: DeFi, perpetual futures --- ***For most of financial history, the supply of new markets — not demand — was the bottleneck. Blockchains remove that bottleneck. I believe this will unlock an explosion of net new markets.*** Markets are mechanisms for transferring risk. Every trade is simply two counterparties agreeing to move some exposure at an agreed price. Abstractly, risk can be expressed along two separate axes: - **The unit**: the underlying exposure (i.e., a company’s cash flows, a barrel of oil, an election outcome, a borrower’s credit, a GPU-hour) - **The instrument:** the mechanism that transfers that exposure (i.e., spot, dated futures, perps, options, event contracts) Almost all of financial history is the story of slowly innovating on one axis at a time. Spot grain markets existed for thousands of years before Chicago listed grain futures in 1865. Currencies floated in 1971 and got futures in 1972. Equity options lived as bespoke dealer contracts for centuries, then became a listed market in 1973 when the CBOE and Black-Scholes arrived. The ETF did not exist until 1993. New units of risk have been even rarer. Interest rates only became widely tradeable in 1981. Default risk waited for the credit default swap in 1994. Volatility waited for VIX derivatives in 2004. Event outcomes only became a real market in the last few years, through prediction markets. ![](https://dwt2zme5yrom6.cloudfront.net/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-29-at-3.17.16-PM-300x123.png) Demand for these markets was arguably never the issue. Farmers wanted to hedge harvests long before the CBOT. Creditors wanted to offload default risk long before CDS. What slowed growth was always the supply of these markets. And historically, two things have throttled supply:  1. Listing committees and legal frameworks 2. Geographic fragmentation Blockchains remove both. They make issuance permissionless and they make distribution global. In my view, that is the killer use case in its most distilled form: Blockchains are the first technology that lets the supply of markets catch up with latent global demand. This thesis manifests empirically as well. Almost every category-defining outcome in crypto has been downstream of this killer use case. From perps and spot DEXs to prediction markets to lending markets to memecoins, NFTs, and tokenized physicals, value has accrued to those who own the issuance and/or the exchange of net new markets onchain. ![](https://dwt2zme5yrom6.cloudfront.net/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-29-at-3.25.55-PM-300x142.png) Each of these respective categories either permissionlessly created a net new unit of risk or a novel way to transfer this risk.  On the unit side, crypto has engineered risk exposures that had little or no prior financial expression. Prediction markets, while dating back to the Iowa Electronic Markets, found product-market-fit onchain and scaled explosively, turning discrete events — an election, a Fed decision, a court ruling — into tradeable units. Peer-to-peer lending markets turned an individual credit relationship into something with a live continuous price. Pre-IPO markets took a risk exposure that was gated to a handful of secondary brokers to something users can trade and hold in size. Even memecoins and NFTs turned abstract units of risk such as attention flows and cultural relevance into legible and tradeable markets. Moreover, crypto has similarly either produced — or scaled — novel mechanisms to transfer these units of risk. AMMs let a market exist before a market maker agreed to quote it. Perps, first proposed in [1993](https://www.nber.org/papers/t0131), found product-market fit onchain by collapsing dated, fragmented exposure into one funding-rate-balanced contract. Binary contracts turned an event outcome into a $1-or-nothing tradeable market. Peer-to-pool lending replaced bilateral loans with a shared pool and a utilization curve. Bonding curves fused issuance and price discovery, so an asset had a market from the first buyer.  Permissionless issuance also produces a lot of noise. That is the cost of removing the listing filter. The point is not that every new market is good. The point is that the market, not a committee, becomes the self-selecting mechanism for which ones survive. ## Perps are the proof There is no cleaner expression of the thesis than perpetual futures, and no cleaner proof than the recent rise of [non-crypto volume](https://defillama.com/rwa/perps/asset-groups) onchain. Because perps are synthetic, the listing constraint collapses to two things: a robust oracle and two counterparties willing to take the other side. As long as you have those, a leveraged market can exist for almost anything. In this sense, perps are one of the most effective coordination mechanisms to ever exist. By this same logic, Hyperliquid is the closest thing we have to a global platform for financial coordination. HIP-3 and HIP-4 let users launch their own derivatives, tap into the venue’s global front end, and monetize accordingly. Lowering the friction to launch markets means more markets, of which demand naturally selects the winners. ![](https://dwt2zme5yrom6.cloudfront.net/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-29-at-3.26.43-PM-300x152.png) It is no coincidence that one of the fastest growing markets in crypto — and, increasingly, in finance — was permissionlessly issued and globally distributed onchain. In July, onchain RWA perps volume reached a $1.4T run-rate, comprising half of Hyperliquid’s book. Abstractly, this is simply existing units of risk — equities, oil, memory stocks — permissionlessly meeting a new instrument of transfer. Downstream, this recombination has fostered an explosion in volume.  Note too that some net new market dominates every quarter. In Q4 2025 it was US equities and commodities; in H1 2026 it was oil, gas, and metals, and most recently semis and memory stocks. Again, this is emblematic of the core thesis. The supply of net new markets is now catching up to whatever the world wants to trade that quarter. ![](https://dwt2zme5yrom6.cloudfront.net/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-29-at-3.36.00-PM-300x135.png) The more profound downstream implication, however, is that permissionlessness, 24/7 trading has become a wedge to price discovery occurring canonically onchain. During the oil shock in February of this year, while CME was closed, WTI [found price discovery](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/12/oil-futures-up-7-on-hyperliquid-as-trump-orders-naval-blockade-of-hormuz) on trade.xyz as one of the most liquid markets globally. Similarly, we saw pre-IPO equities markets for Cerebras and SpaceX pricing the IPOs [more accurately](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/traders-pricing-spacex-70-higher-180711342.html) than bankers, with a marginal delta between the final hour of the pre-IPO perp and the actual market open price. The market is increasingly revealing the structural constraints of traditional markets — lack of 24/7 trading, geographic gating, lack of pre-IPO access, siloed margin — are a sustainable wedge for onchain markets.  \*\*\* Markets transfer units of risk. For arguably all of financial history, they were constrained by geography, listing committees and legal frameworks. Those constraints have now disappeared. The addressable universe of onchain markets is not the set of assets that exist today; it is any risk that anyone – or any agent – anywhere wants to trade. This suggests we’ll continue to see an explosion of net new markets onchain. Both new ways to transfer old risk: commodities and FX perps, indices, 24/7 equity exposure. And new units of risk themselves: compute futures, perps on macro indicators like CPI, music, social trends, sports, and anything else that can be oracled and two-sided. The applications and protocols that issue those markets, and the venues that exchange them, are the ones that will capture the value. \*\*\* *The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the current or enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.* *This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. 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