Author: Nancy, PANews
In less than a year, HYPE has broken historical highs and continues to set new records. Its market capitalization has surpassed the established MEME coin Dogecoin, officially entering the top ten in the global cryptocurrency market capitalization.
The dual drivers of fundamentals and capital have propelled HYPE's strong rise. However, as the U.S. officially opens the compliance door for the crypto perpetual contract market, the next challenge facing Hyperliquid is how to secure a ticket to mainstream financial markets.
HYPE Innovation Surges Against the Trend, Over 90% of Revenue Used for Buybacks
While the overall performance of the crypto market is weak, HYPE has surged against the trend.
According to CoinGecko data, the price of HYPE has surpassed $72, with a market capitalization exceeding $16.1 billion, setting a historical high. In the past 30 days, HYPE has cumulatively risen by 75.4%; if we stretch the timeline to nearly a year, its increase has reached 122.7%, significantly outperforming most mainstream crypto assets.
As HYPE continues to surge, the short sellers have also suffered heavy losses. According to Onchain Lens monitoring, the largest short seller of HYPE, Loracle, has continued to reduce its short positions, with its five times leveraged short position shrinking from an initial $102 million to approximately $60.94 million, currently holding 843,232 HYPE short positions (worth approximately $60.7 million), with an unrealized loss of over $22 million. This whale has been shorting HYPE above $40 since April, trying to average down its holding costs but as HYPE keeps rising, its losses have continued to expand. This short trade not only wiped out about $40 million in profits it made on the Hyperliquid platform over the past ten months but also caused an additional loss of over $5 million.
On the other hand, the long positions have reaped substantial rewards. On-chain data shows that one trader made over $1.4 million in profits within just two days using 10x leveraged long positions in HYPE; while a whale starting with the address 0x082 has held a five times leveraged long position since December 2024, with accumulated unrealized profits exceeding $46 million.
The core strength supporting HYPE's rise mainly comes from the continuous token buybacks by the Assistance Fund under Hyperliquid responsible for buybacks. Hyperscreener data shows that as of now, Hyperliquid's cumulative protocol revenue is close to $950 million, of which approximately $920 million has been used for HYPE buybacks, equivalent to over 96% of the protocol revenue being used for token buybacks. Just this month, Hyperliquid repurchased HYPE tokens worth $44.6 million at an average price of about $69.6.
Moving forward, as Hyperliquid's trading volume and revenue in sectors such as Pre-IPO and prediction markets continue to grow, the protocol will continuously convert cash flow into market buy orders, thus providing long-term support for the HYPE price.
ETF Continues to Attract Capital, Wall Street Funds Accelerate Entry
Apart from protocol buybacks, a familiar DAT play in the crypto circle has also become a catalyst for the recent rise.
Hyperliquid's DAT company, Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. (PURR), was recently included in the Russell Microcap Index constituent stock list. Since its establishment, the company has cumulatively invested approximately $216 million to acquire 7.3 million HYPE, and its total holding has now reached approximately 20 million HYPE.
The market generally believes that after being included in the Russell Index, PURR is expected to gain passive index fund and benchmark tracking fund allocations, attracting new sources of liquidity and further increasing market attention on the Hyperliquid ecosystem.
ETFs are also an important force supporting HYPE's demand. SoSoValue data shows that two HYPE spot ETFs (Bitwise BHYP and 21Shares THYP) have maintained continuous net inflows since their launch, with historical cumulative net inflows close to $110 million, while Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs during the same period have shown net outflows. Notably, Bitwise allocates 10% of its BHYP ETF management fee income for direct purchase and holding of HYPE, which means that the expansion of the ETF scale will continually translate into new market buy orders.
Grayscale is also speeding up its related product layout, recently submitting the S-1 amendment for the HYPE staking ETF and planning to use 2 million HYPE (worth approximately $115 million) as seed assets. In its latest report, Grayscale believes that Hyperliquid is rapidly evolving from a crypto perpetual contract exchange to a blockchain financial infrastructure platform, likely challenging traditional derivatives trading systems in the future and growing into a financial services giant.
This Wall Street script has previously played out with ETH and SOL.
It's worth noting that Hyperliquid will unlock approximately 9.92 million HYPE tokens on June 6, 2026, which, based on the current price of about $72, is worth approximately $713.8 million, accounting for about 2.54% of the circulating supply.
U.S. Approves First Batch of Perpetual Contracts, Hyperliquid Faces a Critical Moment
The U.S. opening up to crypto perpetual contracts (Perps) adds fuel to the entire space.
On May 29, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced the approval of KalshiEX LLC to list BTCPERP perpetual contracts. This is the first true bitcoin perpetual contract in U.S. history, marking the official opening of a compliant crypto perpetual contract market in the U.S. Meanwhile, the CFTC issued an explanatory letter and a no-action letter to Coinbase, allowing it to provide crypto options and perpetual contract services to U.S. users through the affiliated foreign exchange exchange Deribit FZE.
These historic actions are viewed by the market as an important signal of a shift in the U.S. regulatory stance on crypto derivatives. As the compliance framework gradually clarifies, it provides compliant entry points for more institutional funds, likely driving a new growth cycle in the Perps market.
However, for the leading decentralized perpetual platform Hyperliquid, regulatory opening does not mean it has crossed the compliance threshold. There has been recent debate within the crypto community regarding Hyperliquid's compliance and transparency.
Former Multicoin co-founder Kyle Samani stated on X that Hyperliquid is merely "Binance 2.0," relying on phased regulatory arbitrage for advancement, predicting that no real U.S. company will cooperate with it. He even initiated a wager challenge, believing Hyperliquid would be unable to launch a U.S. compliant front-end in the short term.
In response, some community members expressed their willingness to bet $1 million that Hyperliquid can launch a U.S. compliant front-end within three years. However, Kyle later rejected the three-year wagering timeframe, believing Hyperliquid might establish Hyperliquid US through acquisitions of DCOs (Derivatives Clearing Organizations) and DCMs (Designated Contract Markets), adopting a strategy similar to Polymarket. Interestingly, although Kyle continues to publicly question Hyperliquid, Multicoin Capital has begun to make significant purchases and stakes in HYPE months ago.
6MV investor Mike Dudas countered that Kyle’s comparison of Hyperliquid with Binance is unreasonable, as Hyperliquid does not directly invest in its listed assets, does not sell assets through perpetual contracts or Launchpads, does not take multiple percentage points from the supply of listed assets, and does not manipulate platform asset prices and flows through affiliates, and its financial structure is transparent and on-chain, with its economic mechanisms programmed to direct tokens towards holders.
More concerning to the market than community debates is the apparent change in ICE’s attitude.
A few days ago, at an industry conference held by Bernstein, ICE founder and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher suddenly publicly "named" Hyperliquid and gave it high praise, stating, "It's even bigger than Nasdaq, and there are only 11 people, this is a very smart team."
Jeffrey Sprecher specifically mentioned that Hyperliquid has launched SpaceX-related derivatives, and will be tested by the market when SpaceX officially goes public on June 11; it will be very interesting to see if its market price will affect the IPO. He believes that Hyperliquid, with blockchain settlements, stablecoin margins, and a maximum leverage mechanism of 100 times, is attracting more and more market makers and professional trading institutions to participate.
He also stated explicitly that Hyperliquid's perpetual contracts essentially belong to swap products under traditional financial frameworks and revealed that ICE has had multiple rounds of discussions with the Hyperliquid team regarding overlapping business areas and potential cooperation opportunities.
For an industry giant long established in traditional financial infrastructure, it is uncommon to publicly and positively evaluate a crypto-native protocol. Moreover, just weeks ago, ICE was reported to have pressured the CFTC and the U.S. Congress to strengthen regulatory scrutiny on Hyperliquid. Now, its executives openly conveying positive signals and even discussing potential cooperation possibilities adds more imagination space for Hyperliquid's future compliance progress.
Overall, although the CFTC has opened the compliance door for the crypto perpetual contract market and Hyperliquid has already demonstrated the competitiveness of its products, the core challenge it faces to truly penetrate the mainstream U.S. financial market is no longer just about technological innovation.
Whether to embrace compliance or stick to its own approach, Hyperliquid’s choice will also influence the evolution and the landscape of the crypto market.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
