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Key Takeaways
- Hyperliquid’s open interest topped $11 billion and monthly volume hit nearly $178 billion in July, even as gross revenue fell 43% from its peak over four straight quarters.
- The HIP-3 program now routes about half of Hyperliquid’s volume to outside builders, with Trade.xyz accounting for over 90% of that activity.
- HYPE token buybacks have shrunk alongside revenue, while token unlocks, ETF outflows, and rising regulatory scrutiny add further pressure.
Hyperliquid processed more trading volume in July 2026 than at any point in its history, with open interest topping $11 billion and 30-day perpetual futures volume reaching nearly $178 billion. Gross protocol revenue, though, has declined for four consecutive quarters, falling 43% from its peak.
The gap traces to a fee-sharing program that now routes roughly half the platform’s volume to outside developers.
Record Trading Activity, Shrinking Take
Open interest, the total value of leveraged positions held on the platform at any given time, climbed to just above $11 billion on July 13, the highest level Hyperliquid has recorded in 2026. The platform now settles roughly 9% of all open perpetual futures positions worldwide, including on centralized exchanges, up from under 7% in late May.
Gross protocol revenue tells a different story. It peaked at roughly $357 million in the third quarter of 2025, according to DefiLlama data.
Revenue then fell in each of the following three quarters, to nearly $295 million, roughly $217 million and about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026. Trading activity rose over that period even as the platform’s take fell.
HIP-3 Shifts Volume to Outside Builders
Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3, live since October 2025 according to the platform’s own documentation, lets anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE tokens, worth about $28 million at current prices, deploy a perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid’s order books. Deployers can keep up to half of the trading fees generated.
These builder-deployed markets accounted for about 2% of Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures volume at the start of 2026. They now make up roughly half of it. The shift shows in the platform’s accounting.
Cost of revenue, the share of fees passed back to builders, market makers and the platform’s own liquidity vault, was under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025 and had risen to 18% a year later, per DefiLlama figures.
Builder code fees, additional charges that front-end platforms such as Phantom apply for routing an order, illustrate the pass-through directly. Roughly $16 million of second-quarter revenue arrived as builder code fees and left the platform as roughly $16 million of cost in the same quarter.
Real-World Asset Contracts Now Lead the Platform
Traders keep coming back for what the builder-deployed markets offer. Contracts tied to real-world assets, including crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker and pre-IPO names such as SpaceX, reached a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month and overtook Bitcoin as Hyperliquid’s largest market by that measure.
Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities generated $25 billion in volume, 52% of the platform’s weekly total, exceeding crypto perpetual futures volume for the first time.
The contracts settle in stablecoins, do not expire and trade on weekends when the New York Stock Exchange is closed, filling a gap for products like leveraged Nvidia exposure that have few alternative venues outside U.S. market hours.
A Single Deployer Concentrates the Risk
That growth rests largely with one participant. Trade.xyz accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest. That concentration means Hyperliquid’s record trading figures depend heavily on one deployer’s oracle choices, margin settings and risk controls.
The concentration risk surfaced this week. On Monday, a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue drove Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract down 19% and triggered liquidations. Trade.xyz has since agreed to reimburse affected traders.
Token Buybacks Shrink Along With Earnings
Hyperliquid routes about 97% of trading fees, according to Dune data, into an Assistance Fund that buys HYPE on the open market and retires it, removing roughly 44.5 million HYPE from circulating supply to date. Because the buyback is a fixed share of earnings, it contracts when revenue does.
The fund purchased nearly $290 million of HYPE in the third quarter of 2025 and roughly $149 million in the second quarter of 2026, close to half as much.
HYPE traded near $55 on Friday, down 5% for the week and roughly 28% below its June 16 record near $77, market pricing data show. Annualized earnings of about $785 million put the token at roughly 16 times its circulating market value and about 70 times its fully diluted value.
Supply, Regulatory Scrutiny and New Competition
Institutional holders including Multicoin Capital and Bitwise have moved sizable HYPE holdings to exchanges over the past month, blockchain data show, typically a precursor to potential selling rather than confirmation of it.
Supply pressure is also building on schedule. Nearly 10 million HYPE unlocked to core contributors on August 6, worth about $550 million at current prices, one installment in a monthly unlock schedule running through 2027 against a circulating supply of only 222 million tokens.
Spot HYPE exchange-traded funds posted their first weekly outflow in the week to July 17, roughly $7 million, ending a nine-week run of inflows. The Monetary Authority of Singapore added the platform to its investor alert list in late June, following earlier warnings from U.K. regulators.
Executives at CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange have pushed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to review commodity-linked perpetual futures products.
A New Rival Emerges
Competition has also emerged from an unexpected source. 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.
None of this means the business is struggling by the standards of the sector. Research firm ARK Invest placed Hyperliquid and Pump.fun together at 67% of all crypto application revenue as of July 31.
Grayscale Investments has compared Hyperliquid to Amazon Web Services, a platform where outside developers build products while the operator collects a cut of everything traded.
That comparison also applies to the risk facing HYPE holders. Hyperliquid booked roughly $45 million in gross revenue in the first four weeks of the third quarter. Held at that pace, the quarter would land near $150 million, a fourth consecutive decline, with the token’s buyback support shrinking alongside it.
