1 min ago
4 min read
Hyperliquid has never traded more contracts, and it has never kept a smaller share of the money those contracts earn
Open interest, the total value of leveraged positions traders hold at one time, climbed to just above $11 billion on July 13, the platform's highest in 2026. Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures volume over the past 30 days ran to nearly $178 billion. Hyperliquid now settles roughly 9% of all open perp positions worldwide, centralized exchanges included, up from under 7% in late May.
But the platform’s revenue has gone the other way. Gross protocol revenue peaked at roughly $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 and has fallen every quarter since, to nearly $295 million, then roughly $217 million, then about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026, DefiLlama data shows. That is a 43% drop from the top, booked while the trade count climbed.
Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal (HIP-3) helps explain why Hyperliquid is keeping less of the activity it attracts. Since October 2025, anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, can deploy their own perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid's order books and keep up to half the trading fees.
At the start of 2026 these builder-deployed markets were about 2% of Hyperliquid's perp volume. They are now roughly half of it.
The pass-through shows up in the accounts. Cost of revenue, the portion of fees Hyperliquid hands straight back to builders, market makers and its own liquidity vault, was under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025. A year later it was 18%.
Builder code fees, which front-ends like Phantom charge on top for routing an order, arrived at roughly $16 million of revenue in the second quarter and left as roughly $16 million of cost in the same quarter. Every dollar of it passes through.
Traders keep showing up because of what those builder markets list. Real-world asset perps, contracts on things like crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker and pre-IPO names like SpaceX, hit a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month and overtook bitcoin as the platform's largest market by that measure.
Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities did $25 billion in volume, 52% of the weekly total, outpacing crypto perps for the first time. The contracts settle in stablecoins, never expire, and trade through the weekend when the New York Stock Exchange is shut. A product such as leveraged Nvidia exposure, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, has few other homes.
That growth sits largely on one set of shoulders. Trade.xyz accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest, which means Hyperliquid's record numbers depend on a single deployer's oracle choices, margin settings and risk management.
The risk in that arrangement showed earlier this week on Monday, when a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue dropped Trade.xyz's SK Hynix contract 19% and triggered liquidations the firm has since agreed to reimburse.
Hyperliquid routes about 97% of trading fees into its Assistance Fund, which buys the token on the open market and retires it, taking roughly 44.5 million HYPE out of the total supply so far. The buyback is a fixed share of earnings, so it contracts when earnings contract. The fund bought nearly $290 million of HYPE in the third quarter of 2025. In the second quarter of 2026 it bought roughly $149 million, close to half as much.
HYPE traded near $55 on Friday, down 5% on the week and roughly 28% below the June 16 record near $77, CoinDesk data show. Annualized earnings of about $785 million put the token at roughly 16 times its circulating market value and about 70 times fully diluted.
Institutional holders including Multicoin Capital and Bitwise have moved sizeable amounts of HYPE to exchanges over the past month.
The ecosystem around it is thinner than a top-15 ranking suggests. Of the 48 tokens CoinGecko tracks in the Hyperliquid category, HYPE accounts for almost all of the value. The next two, Ethena's USDe at about $4.5 billion and USDT0 at roughly $4 billion, are stablecoins issued elsewhere and bridged in. The largest natively built token is PURR at about $53 million, under half a percent of HYPE. The market still values HYPE largely on Hyperliquid’s exchange economics rather than a broad base of native applications.
Supply and regulators press from the other side. Nearly 10 million HYPE unlocked to core contributors on Aug. 6, about $550 million at current prices, one of a monthly series running through 2027 against a circulating supply of only 222 million.
Spot HYPE ETFs posted their first weekly outflow in the week to July 17, roughly $7 million, ending a nine-week inflow run. Singapore's MAS added the platform to its investor alert list in late June, following earlier U.K. warnings, and CME and ICE executives have pushed the CFTC to review its commodity perps.
Meanwhile, competition has arrived from an unexpected direction. Robinhood Chain, the brokerage's month-old network, has been clearing more than $600 million in daily decentralized-exchange volume on memecoin trading, and by some measures now draws more daily speculative activity than Hyperliquid does.
None of which is the same as saying the business is failing. ARK research put Hyperliquid and Pump.fun together at 67% of all crypto application revenue as of July 31, and Grayscale has compared the platform to Amazon Web Services, a place where outside developers build the products while the operator takes a cut of everything traded.
That comparison contains the problem. Hyperliquid booked roughly $45 million in gross revenue through the first four weeks of the third quarter. Hold that pace and the quarter lands near $150 million, a fourth straight decline, and the bid under HYPE thins with it.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
Building the Zcash Machine: Tachyon and Quantum Readiness
Building the Zcash Machine: Tachyon and Quantum Readiness
Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.
Jun 30, 2026
Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.
Why it matters:
Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.