Hyperliquid Volume Hits Record as Revenue Drops 43%, Buybacks Cut in Half

Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives exchange, is posting record trading activity even as platform revenue shrinks sharply.

CoinDesk reported on Aug. 9 that Hyperliquid’s open interest rose above $11 billion on July 13, the highest level this year. Perpetual futures volume over the past 30 days reached about $178 billion. Hyperliquid’s share of global perpetual futures open interest has also climbed to about 9% from less than 7% at the end of May.

Revenue has moved the other way. DefiLlama data show Hyperliquid’s total protocol revenue peaked at about $357 million in the third quarter of 2025, then declined each quarter to about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026. That marks a 43% drop from the peak.

A key driver of the decline was Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3, or HIP-3, introduced in October 2025. The proposal allows anyone staking 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, to launch a perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid’s order book and keep up to half of the trading fees. These so-called builder-deployed markets accounted for only about 2% of total volume in early 2026. They now make up about half. The fee-expense ratio also climbed to 18% within a year from less than 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025.

The jump in volume has been driven by real-world asset, or RWA, perpetual futures. Open interest in RWA perpetuals, including products tied to crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla and the Nasdaq 100, as well as contracts linked to pre-listing companies such as SpaceX, hit a record $3.6 billion this month. That made it the platform’s largest market, overtaking Bitcoin. From July 13 to July 19, tokenized stock and commodity trading volume reached $25 billion, or 52% of total weekly volume, surpassing crypto perpetuals for the first time.

Still, more than 90% of the growth in RWA perpetuals is concentrated in a single builder, Trade.xyz, underscoring a risk. Earlier this week, a trader executed a large sell order on a thinly traded South Korean premarket exchange. The move sent the price of Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract down 19% and triggered cascading liquidations. Trade.xyz agreed to cover the losses.

The revenue decline has also directly affected HYPE buybacks. Hyperliquid directs about 97% of trading fees to its Assistance Fund, which buys and burns HYPE on the market. The fund bought about $290 million of HYPE in the third quarter of 2025, but that fell to about $149 million in the second quarter of 2026, roughly half the earlier level. A total of 44.5 million HYPE has been burned so far.

HYPE traded near $55 on Aug. 9, down 5% over the past week. That leaves it about 28% below its all-time high of $77 reached on June 16. On an annualized earnings basis, the token trades at about 16 times its circulating market capitalization and about 70 times on a fully diluted basis.

External pressure is also building. On Aug. 6, about 10 million HYPE held by core contributors, worth about $550 million at current prices, was unlocked. Those monthly unlocks will continue through 2027. Circulating supply currently stands at just 222 million HYPE. The Monetary Authority of Singapore added Hyperliquid to its investor alert list in late June, and a similar warning had previously been issued in the UK. Institutional investors including Multicoin Capital and Bitwise have also transferred sizable amounts of HYPE to exchanges over the past month.

CoinDesk said total revenue for the third quarter could come in at about $150 million if the current trend continues, extending the slide to a fourth straight quarter.