Source: Bankless
Author: David Christopher
Original Title: Hyperliquid & The Year Perps Caught Fire
Compiled and Arranged by: BitpushNews
Looking back at the growth of the crypto industry in 2025, Hyperliquid is an unavoidable focal point.
The exchange ended 2024 with an epic airdrop and price performance, attracting a large number of crypto Twitter users to pay attention to the product once again.
By the end of 2025, it had completely transformed—becoming a platform that broke the mold, ranking fourth in revenue across the entire crypto ecosystem with total revenue exceeding $650 million, and at one point capturing 70% of the perpetual futures trading volume.
If you haven't been tracking Hyperliquid's every step, this breakthrough success might seem to have come out of nowhere. But its path to conquest was the product of meticulous design, unconventional growth strategies, and well-deserved external recognition.
What follows is a complete review of Hyperliquid's journey in 2025 (and why it will be truly tested in 2026):
Q1 2025: The Crypto-Native Advantage
Hyperliquid's year of rapid growth began with a profound reminder of what it means to be "truly in tune with the industry's pulse."
When the TRUMP token launched in January, Hyperliquid listed perpetual futures for it almost immediately, beating other exchanges to the punch and starting a winning streak as the "go-to venue for pre-launch token trading."
Of course, its ability to act quickly was partly because it wasn't hindered by the "corporate guardrails" that large exchanges use to protect users and the company.
But a crucial factor was its firm "insider knowledge"—its team was so deeply intertwined with on-chain dynamics that it could spot opportunities and recognize the advantage of being first to list these tokens. This solidified Hyperliquid's reputation as the preferred place to trade new assets before the established giants could react.
In February, HyperEVM was released—a general-purpose smart contract layer built on top of HyperCore (Hyperliquid's exchange engine). Although it took some time to find its footing, its success came without any top-down incentive programs. This meant that when it gained traction in Q2, it had already built a core user base who stayed not to "farm" rewards, but because they believed in the chain's vision and wanted to leverage its unique features (such as interoperability with HyperCore), rather than just extracting incentives.
Q2 2025: The Breakout
Market attention arrived faster than most expected. Beyond the HYPE token rising nearly 4x from its April lows, by May Hyperliquid captured 70% of all on-chain perpetual futures trading volume—a staggering figure for a platform with zero VC backing and zero token incentives.
The HYPE token's highs, the explosive growth of HyperCore activity, and the development of the HyperEVM ecosystem all spread the Hyperliquid story.
As the market came back to life, Hyperliquid's smooth user experience (UX) and deep liquidity captured a massive amount of order flow, with total trading volume climbing to $1.5 trillion.
As mentioned, HyperEVM also hit its stride simultaneously, with its Total Value Locked (TVL) growing from $350 million in April to $1.8 billion by mid-June, fueled by the launch of projects (like Kinetiq, Felix, and Liminal) and users exploring new earning opportunities—all while continuously burning HYPE tokens in the background.
Amid this rapid growth, Hyperliquid seemed to be everywhere.
It appeared on national television, was covered by Bloomberg, and became a focal point in CFTC policy discussions. This exchange became impossible to ignore.
Q3 2025: Peak Momentum and the Beginning of Fragmentation
Q3 began with a signal that Hyperliquid's infrastructure was becoming indispensable even outside its own ecosystem.
The Phantom wallet bypassed Solana-based perp platforms, choosing instead to integrate Hyperliquid via builder codes. Builder codes are a Hyperliquid mechanism that allows external platforms to earn fees by routing trades to HyperCore.
Rabby followed shortly after. Then MetaMask.
A host of mobile trading apps went live via builder codes.
All told, "partners" have earned nearly $50 million in fees through these integrations, routing $158 billion in trading volume.
Then, in September, the USDH bidding war erupted—which showed just how valuable and prominent Hyperliquid had become.
The problem was simple: Hyperliquid held about 8% of the total Circle USDC supply in its bridge, leaking roughly $100 million in annual yield to a direct competitor (Coinbase), while its own ecosystem couldn't recapture that value. Launching a native stablecoin could solve this, potentially redirecting $200 million in annual revenue back to Hyperliquid.
A proposal to launch a stablecoin was invited, and heavyweight contenders entered the bidding.
Ethena offered a $75 million growth commitment and institutional partnerships. Paxos dangled PayPal and Venmo integration, even getting PayPal to tweet about Hyperliquid.
But in the end, Native Markets won the bid—a team led by highly respected HYPE contributor Max Fiege, former Uniswap Labs COO MC Lader, and Paradigm researcher Anish Agnihotri.
Why did a smaller, less capitalized team beat these giants? Because they were more favored, more aligned with Hyperliquid's ethos: bootstrapped, aligned in goals, and ready to build something truly organic—just as Hyperliquid itself was built.
The ripple effects extended beyond Hyperliquid itself. MegaETH announced its own native stablecoin plans shortly after. Sui followed suit in November.
However, USDH also marked the peak of the HYPE token in mid-September—and the moment competition began to show. Aster (a Binance-backed exchange) and Lighter (an Ethereum L2 perp platform) both launched with aggressive airdrop campaigns. Trading volume continued to fragment, Hyperliquid's market share split, and at the time of writing stands at just 17.1%.
Q4 2025: Maturation and Growing Pains
In October, the long-awaited HIP-3 went live, opening permissionless listings on HyperCore, driving the exchange's expansion and decentralization.
Anyone staking 500,000 HYPE can now deploy custom markets, such as:
- Equity perps from Unit's Trade.xyz and Felix Protocol
- Perp markets using yield-bearing collateral (like sUSDE) from protocols like Ethena
- Markets offering synthetic exposure to private companies like SpaceX or Anthropic through platforms like Ventuals
However, despite the HIP-3 launch, the HYPE token price fell nearly 50% from its September peak.
Why? Beyond market conditions and competition, two things stood out.
First, the quarter saw Hyperliquid experience its first ADL (Auto-Deleveraging) event in over two years. During the market crash on October 10th, over-leveraged positions burned through margin faster than the liquidation engine and HLP (Hyperliquid Liquidity Provider) could absorb. The protocol triggered over 40 auto-deleveragings in 12 minutes, forcibly reducing the most profitable positions to rebalance the books. While some argued the affected positions were still "closed in the green," others contended the mechanism liquidated more than was necessary to cover the bad debt. Yes, the system remained solvent without external capital, but Hyperliquid, like the broader market, might need time to recover from this event.
Second, in November, team token unlocks began. Although the total unlock was lower than some expected, this vesting schedule likely also contributed to HYPE's underperformance. The sell-off volume was small—only 23% went to OTC desks, while 40% was re-staked—but the pace of future unlocks remains unclear. My read is the core team is likely still determining the schedule to balance contributor fairness with ecosystem health. But for a protocol known for transparency and "honesty," this lack of clarity can create market unease.
Hyperliquid's first unlock released 1.75 million HYPE after the lock-up period ended, but the pace of future team unlocks has not been fully disclosed.
The Proving Ground for Perpetuals
Despite the cooldown in markets and trading activity, we shouldn't overlook, when trying to understand Hype's underperformance, that the perp ecosystem has evolved profoundly alongside Hyperliquid's own development.
Lighter and Aster are just two examples of on-chain competition. While their volumes might be inflated by airdrop farming, they do offer real alternatives.
In the off-chain realm, Coinbase's perp product will soon compete with Robinhood's moves in the space. As perps continue going mainstream, more competitors will emerge.
In other words, Hyperliquid is in its proving ground, and it will continue into 2026.
The question isn't whether it had a remarkable 2025—it did. The question is whether, as the space gets crowded, the exchange can prove that its path to growth—through integrations like builder codes and decentralized models like HIP-3—remains an advantage.
What got them here was building a better product and a better ecosystem, without taking shortcuts. What keeps them ahead will be doing it all over again.
