a16z: Blockchains Unlock an Explosion of New Markets

• a16z argues blockchains remove geographic and listing constraints, allowing new markets to form around risks that traditional finance could not easily package or distribute.
• Perpetual futures, prediction markets, tokenized assets and DePIN show how permissionless issuance can turn new or existing exposures into continuously tradeable products.
• The opportunity depends on protocols making market creation, discovery and trading cheaper, while weak or illiquid markets are filtered out by demand over time.

An a16z crypto post by Robbie Peterson frames blockchains as infrastructure for creating markets traditional finance struggled to list efficiently. In his thesis, Peterson argues that geography, listing committees and legal frameworks constrained market supply more than demand. Blockchains remove that friction by making issuance permissionless and distribution global, allowing exposures to emerge around events, credit, physical assets and computing resources.

Permissionless Markets Expand What Can Be Traded

The core idea separates risk into two dimensions: the underlying unit of exposure and the instrument used to transfer it. Traditional finance expanded slowly, with futures, options, ETFs and credit derivatives emerging over decades. Crypto compresses that process by letting developers create both new assets and trading mechanisms onchain. Prediction markets, peer-to-peer lending, memecoins and NFTs all turn difficult-to-trade exposures into continuous markets. The growth of prediction markets shows how event outcomes can become tradeable products when issuance and distribution barriers fall.

Perpetual futures provide the clearest example. Because perps are synthetic, a market can exist once there is a reliable oracle and counterparties willing to trade. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 and HIP-4 frameworks push that model further by allowing users to launch derivatives and access liquidity. Permissionless perpetuals can transform equities, commodities and other real-world exposures into 24/7 markets without waiting for traditional exchange listings. RWA perpetual futures reached a $1.4 trillion annualized run-rate in July and represented half of Hyperliquid’s book.

The same logic extends beyond existing financial assets. Blockchains can create markets for risks that had no practical exchange venue, including GPU hours, macro indicators, music trends, sports outcomes and measurable events. The addressable market becomes any exposure that can be priced, verified and matched between willing counterparties. That expansion also opens the door to markets around physical and computing resources that were difficult to package into tradeable instruments.

Permissionless issuance also creates noise, weak projects and markets that fail to attract demand. The model replaces centralized listing filters with market selection, meaning unsuccessful products can disappear as quickly as they launch. The opportunity is not that every onchain market succeeds, but that experimentation becomes cheaper and faster. The same dynamic extends to tokenized asset markets and other categories where new units of risk can be issued globally. If the thesis holds, value may accrue to protocols that make markets easy to launch, discover and trade.