Hyperliquid has never traded this many contracts and has never kept a smaller share of the profits from those contracts.
Open interest, the total value of leveraged positions traders hold at once, reached just over $11 billion on July 13, the platform's highest in 2026. Over the past 30 days, Hyperliquid's perpetual futures contract volume was nearly $178 billion. Hyperliquid now settles roughly 9% of all open perpetual positions globally, including centralized exchanges, up from less than 7% at the end of May.
Yet the platform's revenues are moving in the opposite direction. According to DefiLlama data, the protocol's gross revenue peaked at around $357 million in Q3 2025 and has declined each quarter since, reaching nearly $295 million, then around $217 million, then about $202 million in Q2 2026. This is a 43% drop from the peak, recorded alongside rising transaction counts.
Figure 1.
A Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal (HIP-3) helps explain why Hyperliquid is keeping a smaller share of the activity it attracts. Since October 2025, anyone who stakes 500,000 $HYPE, about $28 million at current prices, can list their own perpetual futures order books on Hyperliquid and keep up to half the trading fees.
In early 2026, these maker-built markets accounted for about 2% of Hyperliquid's perpetual order volume. Now they account for roughly half.
This is reflected in the reporting. Maker rebate value, the portion of fees that Hyperliquid directly returns to market makers and to its own liquidity vault, was less than 6% of gross revenue in Q2 2025. A year later, it reached 18%.
Usage fees, which platforms like Phantom charge extra for order processing, brought in roughly $16 million in revenue in Q2 and accounted for roughly $16 million in losses for the same quarter. Every dollar from this passes through the system.
Figure 2.
Real-world assets, such as contracts on oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, the Nasdaq-100 index, and shares of companies preparing for IPO like SpaceX, reached a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month and overtook Bitcoin as the platform's largest market by that metric.
From July 13 to 19, tokenized stock and commodity trading volume was $25 billion, making up 52% of the weekly volume, surpassing crypto assets for the first time. The contracts settle in stablecoins, have no expiry, and trade through weekends when the NYSE is closed. A product like leveraged Nvidia stock at 2 a.m. on a Sunday has few other uses.
This growth is largely held up by one person. Trade.xyz accounts for over 90% of all HIP-3 open interest. This means Hyperliquid's record figures depend on the oracle choice, margin settings, and risk management of a single investor.
The risk in this arrangement surfaced on Monday this week when a single trade on a low-volume Korean premarket venue caused Trade.xyz's SK Hynix contract to drop 19% and triggered liquidations which the firm later agreed to cover.
Hyperliquid directs about 97% of trading fees to its assistance fund, which buys tokens on the open market and removes them from circulation, having taken about 44.5 million $HYPE out of total supply. The buyback is a fixed share of profits, so it shrinks when profits fall. The fund bought nearly $290 million worth of $HYPE in Q3 2025. In Q2 2026, it bought about $149 million worth, nearly half that amount.
On Friday, $HYPE traded around $55, down 5% for the week and about 28% below its June 16 record high around $77. Annualized earnings are around $785 million, roughly 16 times its circulating market cap and about 70 times on a fully diluted basis.
Over the past month, institutional holders including Multicoin Capital and Bitwise have moved significant volumes of $HYPE to exchanges.
The ecosystem around it is far weaker than a top-15 ranking suggests. Of the 48 tokens tracked by CoinGecko in the Hyperliquid category, $HYPE accounts for almost all the value. The next two, Ethena's USDe (about $4.5 billion) and USDT0 (roughly $4 billion), are stablecoins issued on other platforms and integrated. The largest token built specifically for this platform is PURR (about $53 million), less than half a percent of $HYPE. The market still prices $HYPE mostly on Hyperliquid platform exchange economics, not on a wide range of native applications.
Figure 3.
Supply and regulators apply pressure from the other side. On August 6, nearly 10 million $HYPE, worth about $550 million at current prices, were unlocked for core participants. This is one of the monthly unlocks scheduled through 2027, out of a total circulating $HYPE supply of just 222 million.
In the week to July 17, spot $HYPE ETFs saw their first net outflows of roughly $7 million, ending a 9-week inflow streak. In late June, Singapore's MAS added the platform to its investor alert list, following earlier warnings from the UK, while CME and ICE executives urged the CFTC to reconsider its sanctions on commodity markets.
Meanwhile, competition has come from an unexpected side. The Robinhood Chain broker-dealer network, only a month old, processes over $600 million daily on decentralized exchanges trading meme coins and, by some measures, now draws more speculative activity than Hyperliquid.
None of this means the business is failing. According to ARK Research, as of July 31, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun together accounted for 67% of all crypto application revenue, and Grayscale compared the platform to Amazon Web Services—a platform where third-party developers build products and the operator takes a cut of all trades.
And therein lies the problem. For the first four weeks of Q3, Hyperliquid grossed about $45 million in revenue. At that pace, quarterly revenue would approach $150 million, marking a fourth consecutive decline, and with it, a weakening of $HYPE's growth potential.
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