The Crypto Tape – RWA Perps with Alvin Hsia of Ventuals

Alvin Hsia, co-founder and CEO of Ventuals, joins Frank Chaparro for a conversation about building perpetual markets for real-world assets and bringing on-chain leverage to a non-crypto audience.Alvin spent six years at Airbnb before going through DeFi summer in 2020 and eventually co-founding Ventuals, a Paradigm-backed perps exchange built on Hyperliquid. In two months, Ventuals has crossed $100M in cumulative volume with markets on SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and public sector ETFs.In this conversation, Alvin breaks down why NYSE's move into tokenized equities is good for on-chain perp platforms, how the weekend oracle problem works and why continuous spot pricing solves it, and why the RWA perp space has a meaningful structural advantage over crypto-native products when it comes to onboarding retail. He also reflects on what DeFi summer produced, which primitives survived, and why he sees perps as the most accessible leverage instrument for the next wave of users.If you're interested in the convergence of traditional finance and on-chain markets, this episode is worth your time.