Author: Curi Bei, Deep Tide TechFlow

In the past month, the attention of the crypto market has been on the back-and-forth of Bitcoin or simply on the bull market of gold and silver. However, amidst this boring sideways movement, a platform is quietly making an offensive, Hyperliquid.

Three Numbers to Explain What Happened

First, let's talk about the data. On Monday, January 27, Hyperliquid's HIP-3 open interest reached a historical high of $793 million. A month ago, this number was only $260 million.

What is HIP-3?

In simple terms, it is the "permissionless perpetual contract deployment" feature that Hyperliquid launched last October. Anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE tokens can issue perpetual contract markets on the platform. It sounds technical, but the results are tangible; within less than four months of its launch, this feature has generated a cumulative trading volume of $25 billion.

The second data point is even more interesting.

Hyperliquid's CEO Jeff Yan recently shared a comparison chart: the bid-ask spread for BTC perpetual contracts on the platform is only $1, while Binance's spread is $5.5. In terms of order book depth, Hyperliquid has 140 BTC at certain price levels, while Binance only has 80.

What does this mean? It means that in terms of liquidity, a decentralized exchange is starting to compete with the largest centralized exchange in the world.

The third data point is the easiest to overlook but may be the most critical: the 24-hour trading volume of silver perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid reached $1.25 billion, making it the third-largest trading asset on the platform, only behind BTC and ETH. The trading volume of gold perpetual contracts also reached $131 million.

The hottest trading products on crypto exchanges are gradually being dominated by traditional precious metals.

How Did Liquidity Grow?

The growth of Hyperliquid's liquidity follows a classic "flywheel effect."

Initially, the platform used the HyperBFT consensus algorithm to achieve a transaction confirmation speed of 0.2 seconds, processing 200,000 orders per second. This performance data encouraged professional market makers to come and test the waters.

Once market makers discovered that "on-chain trading can be this fast," they would invest more funds to provide liquidity. As liquidity deepens, retail and institutional traders find that slippage is very low, and the trading experience is close to Binance, prompting them to shift their orders to this platform.

As trading volume increases, market makers earn money from the fee-sharing, allowing them to continue increasing their investments. With more funds coming in, the order book becomes deeper, enabling larger single transaction sizes, and thus hedge funds and quantitative teams also begin to include Hyperliquid in their trading channels.

Currently, Hyperliquid accounts for about 70% of the open interest in the decentralized perpetual contract market, several times that of the second place. This gap is continuing to widen.

The "Unexpected Surge" in Precious Metal Trading

The popularity of gold and silver perpetual contracts seems a bit inexplicable; how did a crypto exchange become the main venue for precious metal trading?

In 2025, gold rose by 67%, the largest annual increase in 45 years. Silver was even more impressive, rising by 145%, and this year it has increased by 53%, breaking the historical high of $117 per ounce.

Global central banks are buying gold, ETFs are buying gold, and retail investors are also buying gold. "Inflation trading" has become a consensus—everyone believes that governments are printing money excessively, fiat currencies will depreciate, and hard assets will retain their value.

However, the problem is that traditional financial markets have high barriers to entry for gold futures, limited leverage, and require KYC. On Hyperliquid, you can trade gold perpetual contracts with 50-100 times leverage without identity verification, making capital efficiency absurdly high.

As a result, a group of hedge funds and commodity traders who originally traded gold on COMEX began to try opening positions on Hyperliquid. They came in for gold but quickly discovered, "Oh, on-chain trading of BTC and ETH is also this convenient."

This is the logic of user migration: using a familiar asset (gold) to attract traditional financial market traders to the blockchain, and then letting them discover trading opportunities in crypto assets themselves.

TradeXYZ, the largest market deployer of HIP-3, now accounts for 90% of HIP-3 trading volume. Its three largest markets are: XYZ100 (tracking the top 100 companies' index), silver, and Nvidia stock perpetual contracts, with cumulative trading volumes of $12.7 billion, $3 billion, and $1.2 billion, respectively.

This is no longer a "crypto-native" exchange; it resembles a "full-asset trading layer."

Valuation Logic and Risks

The HYPE token has risen by 50% in a week, with the price returning to around $32. The underlying logic is straightforward: Hyperliquid uses 97% of the protocol's fee revenue for repurchasing and burning HYPE. The larger the trading volume, the more fees generated, and the stronger the demand for HYPE repurchases.

As the open interest of HIP-3 rises from $260 million to $793 million, and the daily trading volume of silver perpetual contracts exceeds $1.2 billion, these numbers will translate into real fee revenue, ultimately becoming buying pressure for HYPE.

However, risks are also accumulating. Currently, HYPE's fully diluted valuation (FDV) exceeds $30 billion, which has fully priced in the expectation of "Hyperliquid becoming one of the top three DEXs."

Short-term risks include:

Regulatory crackdowns. If the U.S. SEC or CFTC determines that Hyperliquid's precious metal perpetual contracts are "unregistered commodity futures," they may exert pressure. Although decentralized protocols theoretically "cannot be shut down," regulatory pressure could scare off market makers and institutional funds.

Intensifying competition. Various exchanges are eyeing the commodities and U.S. stock market pie, and may launch products with lower fees or higher performance at any time.

However, from a trader's perspective, as long as the open interest of HIP-3 continues to hit new highs, as long as the BTC order book depth continues to approach that of Binance, and as long as precious metal trading volume continues to grow, these three indicators remain intact, HYPE will remain in an upward channel.

Underlying Logic: The "Efficiency Revolution" of Decentralization

The story of Hyperliquid is essentially a "decentralized efficiency revolution."

In the past, the core selling point of decentralized exchanges was "security." When centralized exchanges faced crises, on-chain exchanges became a refuge. This was a passive, defensive value.

Now, leading DEXs are beginning to demonstrate their ability for "proactive offense": using faster speeds, lower slippage, and a richer product offering to directly seize market share from CEXs.

Hyperliquid's daily trading volume has stabilized at 3-5 times that of dYdX, and in certain smaller tokens, it even approaches Binance's trading depth.

When the on-chain trading experience comes infinitely close to that of centralized exchanges, and when users no longer need to sacrifice efficiency for "decentralization," the entire market's power structure will be redefined.

The explosion of precious metal perpetual contracts is just the first step in this transformation. As more traditional assets gain sufficient liquidity on-chain, and as more traditional traders discover "oh, decentralized exchanges can be this user-friendly," the next step will be the comprehensive on-chain integration of stocks, forex, and commodities.

What Hyperliquid is engaging in resembles a quiet infiltration war.

And the $793 million in HIP-3 open interest is merely a milestone annotation in this infiltration war.

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