As Bloomberg writes, initially created for cryptospeculation organizations are choosing to trade commodities. The reason is that the ultra-profitable strategies that have been working in the crypto market for the last few years are a thing of the past, while traditional assets make it possible to find new high-yield options for earning money, RBC reports.
It’s not about participants leaving the crypto market altogether, but a shift to trading futures and other derivatives based on traditional assets like gold, silver and stocks. Since the beginning of 2026, crypto platforms and crypto exchanges have been actively adding such instruments to their trading lists. And by early April, the trading volumes of metal and stock futures had already surpassed those of the vast majority of cryptocurrencies.
As Bloomberg notes, the round-the-clock trading of derivatives on traditional assets offered by cryptocurrency platforms provides many speculative opportunities. This is because prices vary across platforms, weekend trading deviates from the closing prices of traditional markets, just as the correlation between related assets is broken.
As earlier bitcoin trading strategies are no longer generating the expected returns, companies are looking for new ones. For example, the head of hedge fund Alpha EV, Taylor Godwin, said that the fund uses arbitrage between related commodity assets.
“So far, we have allocated less than 5% of capital to such trades, but that proportion could rise to 20% as opportunities arise,” Godwin said.
Trend away from cryptocurrencies
A survey by Crypto Insights Group of 51 fund managers overseeing more than $3 billion found that nearly half of respondents expect about 50% of their capital to be allocated to non-cryptocurrency transactions.
The data also points to the reason for traders’ interest. M-Squared hedge fund manager Casper Shafran told Bloomberg that his strategies for arbitrage between blockchain platforms and traditional exchanges yield 1-3% per month, while classic crypto strategies yield only 0.5%.
“Market-neutral strategies based on cryptocurrencies are still not effective enough. Therefore, we are focusing on new approaches based on arbitrage in the traditional asset sector,” said Shafran.
Fasanara Digital partner Nikita Fadeev described the segment as nascent but fast-growing. And Rajiv Sawhney, head of international portfolio management at Waves Digital Assets, said they are already working on launching a specialized fund to capitalize on the opportunities in this market.
The shift of crypto hedge funds to traditional assets is indirectly supported by data from crypto exchanges themselves. According to Binance analytics, in just 90 days since the launch of trading in tokenized derivatives on traditional assets, the exchange has gone from zero to a peak $7.6 billion daily volume in gold alone.
On some days, gold activity on the crypto exchange reached 3-8% of the volume of the flagship COMEX (CME Group), and silver activity reached 10-21%.
This trend is especially pronounced on the background of regional exchanges. At peak times, the volume of gold trading on Binance is equivalent to 11% of the Shanghai Futures Exchange (the world’s second largest futures exchange), but at the same time it exceeds the activity of the Dubai DGCX exchange 6 times and the Indian MCX exchange almost 2.5 times.
In other words, the infrastructure built for cryptocurrencies has taken a notable share in just a few months and is comparable to traditional pricing centers for classic assets. This thesis has been promoted for some time by Larry Fink, head of the BlackRock management company, calling tokenization a key tool for modernizing classical finance.
The situation when crypto platforms become a platform where crypto users trade traditional assets is radically different from the original position of the blockchain market, which was created and developed for many years as an alternative to the existing financial system.
