Hyperliquid's record open interest is no longer translating into record revenue, as a fee-sharing program hands half the platform's volume to outside builders.
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Hyperliquid revenue falls 43% as RWA perps boom eats into HYPE
Hyperliquid's record open interest is no longer translating into record revenue, as a fee-sharing program hands half the platform's volume to outside builders.
Hyperliquid's open interest hit a record $11 billion on July 13 while gross revenue fell a fourth straight quarter to $202 million, DefiLlama data shows.
The gap traces to HIP-3, a fee-sharing program that since October 2025 has let anyone staking 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million, deploy their own perpetual markets and keep up to half the trading fees.
Builder-deployed markets grew from about 2% of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly half now. Cost of revenue, the portion of fees Hyperliquid hands back to builders, market makers and its own liquidity vault, was under 6% of gross revenue in Q2 2025 and 18% a year later. Builder code fees arrived at roughly $16 million of revenue in the second quarter and left as roughly $16 million of cost.
The buyback that backs HYPE contracts with earnings. Hyperliquid routes about 97% of trading fees into its Assistance Fund, which buys the token on the open market and retires it, taking roughly 44.5 million HYPE out of supply. The fund bought nearly $290 million of HYPE in Q3 2025 but roughly $149 million in Q2 2026, close to half as much.
RWA perps drive the volume
Traders keep showing up because of what those builder markets list. Real-world asset perps — contracts on crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker and pre-IPO names like SpaceX — hit a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month and overtook bitcoin as the platform's largest market by that measure.
Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities did $25 billion in volume, 52% of the weekly total, outpacing crypto perps for the first time. The contracts settle in stablecoins, never expire, and trade through the weekend when the New York Stock Exchange is shut.
That growth sits largely on one set of shoulders. Trade.xyz accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest, which means Hyperliquid's record numbers depend on a single deployer's oracle choices, margin settings and risk management. The risk showed on Monday, when a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue dropped Trade.xyz's SK Hynix contract 19% and triggered liquidations the firm has since agreed to reimburse.
HYPE's thinning bid
HYPE traded near $55 on Friday, down 5% on the week and roughly 28% below the June 16 record near $77, CoinDesk data show. Annualized earnings of about $785 million put the token at roughly 16 times its circulating market value and about 70 times fully diluted.
Institutional holders including Multicoin Capital and Bitwise have moved sizeable amounts of HYPE to exchanges over the past month. Nearly 10 million HYPE unlocked to core contributors on Aug. 6, about $550 million at current prices, one of a monthly series running through 2027 against a circulating supply of only 222 million.
Spot HYPE ETFs posted their first weekly outflow in the week to July 17, roughly $7 million, ending a nine-week inflow run. Singapore's MAS added the platform to its investor alert list in late June, following earlier U.K. warnings, and CME and ICE executives have pushed the CFTC to review its commodity perps.
Competition has arrived from an unexpected direction. Robinhood Chain, the brokerage's month-old network, has been clearing more than $600 million in daily decentralized-exchange volume on memecoin trading, and by some measures now draws more daily speculative activity than Hyperliquid does.
None of which is the same as saying the business is failing. ARK research put Hyperliquid and Pump.fun together at 67% of all crypto application revenue as of July 31, and Grayscale has compared the platform to Amazon Web Services, a place where outside developers build the products while the operator takes a cut of everything traded.
That comparison contains the problem. Hyperliquid booked roughly $45 million in gross revenue through the first four weeks of the third quarter. Hold that pace and the quarter lands near $150 million, a fourth straight decline, and the bid under HYPE thins with it.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
