Hyperliquid’s decision to let outside builders launch their own trading markets and keep as much as half of the fees they generate is unlikely to last, according to Kain Warwick, the founder of Infinex and Synthetix.
Speaking on the August 12 episode of Unchained’s Uneasy Money, Warwick said the exchange will probably have to pull back the share it currently gives those builders.
HIP-3 gives builders access to a large slice of fees
Under Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 system, anyone can stake 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, to deploy a permissionless perpetual futures market and keep up to 50% of the trading fees that market produces.
Most of those builder-operated markets are tokenized real-world assets, including stocks and commodities. DefiLlama data cited in the report shows they have expanded from roughly 2% of Hyperliquid’s trading volume at the start of 2026 to about half of total volume today.
Warwick called the 50% split “a bit crazy”
Warwick said he had seen the same kind of negotiation before at Synthetix. There, market makers that wanted to run order books kept pushing for economics closer to “80/20,” but never got them.
“At Synthetix, the highest it ever got to was like 30%,” Warwick said on the show. He added that outside parties asking for a larger share usually arrive with claims about how expensive and difficult the work is.
Against that backdrop, Hyperliquid’s current terms stand out. “The fact that Hyperliquid has landed on 50% of the fees is a bit crazy,” he said. “I can’t see how that’s sustainable.”
His argument was that Hyperliquid holds the pricing power. Builders may be able to take their markets elsewhere, but Hyperliquid itself has no real substitute, Warwick said, referring to the exchange as the “mothership.” In his view, that leaves room for the platform to cut the builder share over time without losing the core venue.
“I think 50% was an opening offer that probably is gonna change,” he said on the podcast.
Revenue and buybacks have dropped even as usage held up
The fee split has direct implications for HYPE holders. Hyperliquid sends nearly all of its own share of trading fees, about 99% after excluding the builders’ cut, into an Assistance Fund that buys back HYPE. If the protocol takes less, buybacks also shrink.
DefiLlama data shows gross revenue fell for four straight quarters, sliding from roughly $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 to about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026. That marks a 43% decline, even though trading volumes remained relatively firm.
Quarterly buybacks fell over the same period, from nearly $290 million to about $149 million.
Warwick said the gap comes down to who receives the fees, not to a sharp drop in fee generation. “Volume is barely down,” he said. “The fees are just going to different people.”
Open interest is concentrated in one builder
Open interest is also heavily concentrated. According to DefiLlama data cited in the report, one builder, trade.xyz, accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest. Tokenized real-world-asset perpetuals reached a record $3.6 billion in open interest in July, surpassing bitcoin open interest on the platform.
Warwick said the dependence runs both ways: the platform relies heavily on a single counterparty, while that counterparty depends entirely on a protocol it does not control.
“You never wanna be fully reliant on one platform,” he said, adding that Hyperliquid could cut a builder’s fee share or absorb its markets at any time.
HYPE remains below its June record
DefiLlama data shows HYPE recently traded around $57.66, below its June record of $76.67. The report added that the protocol is still burning tokens from daily fees.