DeepSigma, Built by Goldman and Citadel Alumni, Opens $10M Token Offering on Republic

Tokenized real-world assets, the stocks, Treasuries and commodities that are recorded on public blockchains, have grown from about $6 billion at the start of 2025 to $31.4 billion by May 2026. Trading on those assets has grown even faster, with monthly volume in RWA perpetual futures reaching $117.3 billion in August 2026, 44 times the level of a year earlier, while 86% of that trading now happens on-chain.

The demand comes from traders who already use crypto exchanges and want exposure to the S&P 500, gold or crude oil without opening a brokerage account, as decentralized perpetual futures exchanges traded about $6.7 trillion in 2025, up 346% in a year. The hard part is that these assets come from markets that keep office hours, since US stocks trade for only 32.5 hours of a 168-hour week, while an on-chain contract can trade every hour of the year.

DeepSigma, a New York company building a decentralized perpetual futures exchange for real-world assets, opened a token offering of up to $10 million on Republic on 10 November 2026 to fund that jump. Its public demo already lists 77 paper-trading markets tied to equities, indices and commodities. The money is meant to take it to a live, production-ready exchange, with mainnet targeted about three months after the token sale.

Tokenized Real-World Assets

Tokenization means recording ownership of a traditional asset, such as a Treasury bill, a share or a bar of gold, as a token on a blockchain so it can move and settle like any other crypto asset. The market for these tokens grew by about 66% in the first ten weeks of 2026 alone, from $14.1 billion to $23.6 billion, with tokenized funds holding about $10.5 billion, tokenized gold and commodities about $6.5 billion and tokenized equities about $4 billion.

Tokenized stocks passed $1 billion in on-chain value in March 2026, while tokenized US Treasuries rose above $11 billion, which gives on-chain markets reliable collateral and price feeds that were missing two years ago. Those two ingredients matter for derivatives, because a futures exchange needs a trusted price for the asset it tracks along with safe collateral to hold against traders' positions.

On-Chain Perpetual Futures

A perpetual future, or perp, is a derivatives contract with no expiry date that tracks the price of an asset, so traders can go long or short with borrowed money for as long as their margin covers the position. Perps are the most traded product in crypto. Decentralized exchanges that run them on-chain grew their volume from about $1.5 trillion in 2024 to about $6.7 trillion in 2025, taking roughly 19% of all perpetuals trading by January 2026.

Hyperliquid has led that shift, with its HIP-3 markets, which let outside builders list new perpetuals such as stocks and commodities, passing $62 billion in monthly volume in May 2026. The same month Hyperliquid reached a record 6.63% of global perpetuals volume, which shows that a single on-chain venue can now compete with the largest centralized exchanges on derivatives.

The RWA Perpetuals Boom

Perpetuals on real-world assets are the fastest-growing part of that market, with monthly volume rising 44 times in a year to $117.3 billion in August 2026 after a peak of $145.1 billion in July. Open interest, the total value of positions still open, rose about 30-fold from $161 million in July 2025 to $4.8 billion, while stocks made up 48% of August volume, commodities 28% and indices 18%.

Trading has also moved on-chain at speed. Centralized exchanges handled about two-thirds or more of RWA perpetuals volume in November 2025, the two were roughly level by December and on-chain venues took 86% of the market in August 2026, or about $101 billion against $16 billion on centralized exchanges. A year earlier commodities made up 84% of this volume, which means stocks and indices have gone from a side product to the main event in about twelve months.

Markets That Close

A perpetual contract on a crypto token can follow a price that never stops, while a contract on Apple or the S&P 500 follows a market that opens at 9:30am and closes at 4pm in New York on weekdays. That gives US stocks about 32.5 trading hours a week and about 1,640 hours a year (our arithmetic), against 8,760 hours in a year, which leaves the contract's home market shut for about 81% of the week, including a 65.5-hour gap every weekend.

Chart 5. US stocks trade for 32.5 hours of a 168-hour week.

DeepSigma's chief executive Sky Guo has said that the hardest part of bringing real-world assets on-chain is handling price moves while the underlying market is closed, not creating another market symbol. News that breaks on a Saturday still has to be priced on an exchange that never closes, so DeepSigma plans to use several external price sources, mark-price rules meant to limit manipulation and circuit breakers that can pause trading when prices move too far.

The Offering

The offering, run by DeepSigma Inc., a Delaware company, targets up to $10 million and is open only to verified US accredited investors under Regulation D Rule 506(c) and, in separate offshore transactions under Regulation S, to eligible non-US persons in designated jurisdictions. The minimum investment is $1,000, with 20% of tokens released at the token generation event and the remaining 80% vesting in equal steps over the following six months, so a buyer holds their full allocation about half a year after launch.

The money is earmarked for four pieces of work that a live exchange needs, namely a central limit order book matching engine, integration with the Cypherium blockchain, identity-based permissioning and independent security audits. DeepSigma is targeting mainnet about three months after the token sale, subject to development progress. Until then the platform remains a demo and paper-trading environment with no live trading.

How DeepSigma Works

DeepSigma is built around a central limit order book, the same matching model that stock exchanges use, where buyers and sellers post prices and the engine pairs them. A separate clearing layer handles positions, collateral, margin and settlement, while the planned risk framework includes position and exposure limits, partial liquidations and an insurance mechanism for stressed markets.

The exchange is being built on Cypherium, a Layer 1 blockchain that combines Proof-of-Work with a consensus method derived from HotStuff. Cypherium's underlying technology is covered by four granted US patents that are licensed to DeepSigma. Access will be controlled by a decentralized identity system that uses zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that lets traders prove they are eligible without publishing who they are on-chain, which is how DeepSigma plans to meet jurisdiction-specific rules.

The public demo already shows the product's shape, with 77 RWA perpetual contracts covering indices such as the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite and Russell 2000, commodities such as gold, silver, crude oil and copper, along with sector ETFs and Treasury yields. Traders can paper trade, follow a public leaderboard and use an AI Market Analysis Desk that runs off-chain and cannot place trades or move funds.

Founder Thesis

Sky Guo, DeepSigma's chief executive, founded Cypherium and is a named inventor on its patented consensus technology. He co-authored a paper on distributed ledger options for central bank digital currencies with Thomas Moser of the Swiss National Bank and has spoken at the United Nations headquarters and Nasdaq, which gives him a rare mix of protocol design and central-bank policy experience.

Chief financial officer Albert Xu was a portfolio manager in Goldman Sachs' fixed income, currencies and commodities division, while chief quant director Jenny Chen was a quantitative macro trader at Citadel Securities and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in finance. Chief technology officer Chaoran Wang is a former Google and Uber engineer who founded the quantitative trading firm UmiUmi, so the team covers market structure, trading risk and exchange engineering between them.

Their shared view is that the next big derivatives market will list traditional assets on open blockchains, but only for venues that can price closed markets safely and control who is allowed to trade. That is why DeepSigma treats compliance and risk controls as part of the core design, with permissioning built into the identity layer and a clearing model borrowed from traditional exchanges.

Regulatory Status

DeepSigma describes its approach as compliance-first, yet that approach does not amount to registration with or approval from the SEC or the CFTC for the exchange. Access to future trading will depend on each user's jurisdiction and eligibility. The tokens in the offering are securities that have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, so they carry transfer and resale restrictions.

The platform is developed by DeepSigma Inc. in Delaware and will be operated by DeepSigma Limited in Hong Kong. Token investments of this kind are speculative and can lose their entire value, which is why the offering is limited to verified accredited investors in the US and eligible investors offshore, who should read the private placement memorandum before committing.

Outlook in 2027

The next three months are the real test, because DeepSigma has to turn a paper-trading demo into an exchange with a working matching engine, audited code and live settlement on Cypherium. If it reaches mainnet on schedule, it will join a market where on-chain venues already handle 86% of RWA perpetuals volume and where stocks have overtaken commodities as the most traded asset class.

Real-world asset perpetuals went from a niche product to more than $100 billion a month in about a year, which shows how much demand there is for trading traditional markets on crypto rails. DeepSigma is building for the part of that market that cares most about pricing closed markets well and controlling access. Its ex-Goldman, Citadel and Google team now has a funding route to prove the model works with real money.