Hyperliquid is handling more trading than ever, but it is keeping a smaller slice of what that activity earns.
Open interest on the platform rose to just above $11 billion on July 13, the highest level Hyperliquid has seen in 2026. Over the past 30 days, perpetual futures volume reached nearly $178 billion. By open positions, Hyperliquid now settles roughly 9% of the global perp market, including centralized exchanges, up from less than 7% in late May.
Revenue has kept falling even as activity expands
DefiLlama data shows gross protocol revenue peaked at about $357 million in the third quarter of 2025. Since then it has declined every quarter, slipping to nearly $295 million, then roughly $217 million, and then about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026. That marks a 43% drop from the peak, even as trade counts continued to rise.
CoinDesk pointed to Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3, or HIP-3, as a central reason the platform is retaining less of the business it attracts. Since October 2025, anyone staking 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, has been able to deploy a perpetual futures market directly on Hyperliquid’s order books and keep as much as half of the trading fees.
At the start of 2026, builder-deployed markets represented about 2% of Hyperliquid’s perp volume. They now account for roughly half.
Fee pass-through is taking a larger share
The effect is visible in the accounts. Cost of revenue, the share of fees Hyperliquid sends back to builders, market makers, and its own liquidity vault, was below 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025. A year later, that figure had risen to 18%.
Builder code fees show the clearest pass-through. Front ends such as Phantom charge those fees on top when routing an order. In the second quarter of 2026, these fees added roughly $16 million in revenue and left as roughly $16 million in cost in the same period. None of that stayed with the platform.
RWA perps are driving the growth
Traders have kept coming in large part because builder markets list products tied to traditional assets. Real-world asset perpetuals tied to crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker, and pre-IPO names such as SpaceX hit a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month. By that measure, they overtook bitcoin as Hyperliquid’s largest market.
From July 13 to July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities generated $25 billion in volume, or 52% of the weekly total. That was the first time they outpaced crypto perps on the platform. These contracts settle in stablecoins, do not expire, and continue trading through the weekend when the New York Stock Exchange is closed. CoinDesk highlighted one example: leveraged Nvidia exposure at 2 a.m. on a Sunday has few other venues.
That growth is heavily concentrated. Trade.xyz accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest, leaving Hyperliquid’s record metrics dependent on one deployer’s oracle choices, margin settings, and risk controls.
The risk in that setup showed up on Monday earlier this week. A single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue pushed Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract down 19% and triggered liquidations. The firm later agreed to reimburse affected users.
The HYPE buyback engine weakens when earnings fall
Hyperliquid directs about 97% of trading fees into its Assistance Fund. The fund buys HYPE on the open market and retires the tokens. So far, it has removed roughly 44.5 million HYPE from total supply.
Because the buyback is tied to earnings, it shrinks when earnings shrink. The fund bought nearly $290 million worth of HYPE in the third quarter of 2025. In the second quarter of 2026, it bought about $149 million, close to half that amount.
CoinDesk data shows HYPE traded near $55 on Friday, down 5% over the week and about 28% below the June 16 high near $77. Based on annualized earnings of about $785 million, the token was valued at roughly 16 times circulating market value and about 70 times fully diluted value.
Supply, flows, and regulators are adding pressure
Institutional holders including Multicoin Capital and Bitwise have moved sizeable amounts of HYPE to exchanges over the past month.
The surrounding ecosystem also looks narrow relative to Hyperliquid’s top-15 status. CoinGecko tracks 48 tokens in the Hyperliquid category, but HYPE makes up almost all of the value. The next two, Ethena’s USDe at about $4.5 billion and USDT0 at roughly $4 billion, are stablecoins issued elsewhere and bridged in. The largest natively built token is PURR at about $53 million, less than 0.5% of HYPE. That leaves HYPE valued mainly on the economics of Hyperliquid’s exchange business rather than on a broad native application base.
Supply is increasing at the same time. Nearly 10 million HYPE unlocked to core contributors on Aug. 6, worth about $550 million at current prices. It is one release in a monthly series that runs through 2027, against a circulating supply of only 222 million.
In the week ending July 17, spot HYPE ETFs recorded their first weekly outflow, about $7 million, snapping a nine-week streak of inflows. On the regulatory side, the Monetary Authority of Singapore added the platform to its investor alert list in late June, after earlier warnings in the U.K. Executives at CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange have also pressed the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to review commodity perps tied to the platform.
Competition is rising, and Q3 has started softly
Competition has also arrived from an unexpected direction. Robinhood Chain, a network launched just one month ago, has been clearing more than $600 million in daily decentralized exchange volume on memecoin trading. By some measures, it now attracts more speculative daily activity than Hyperliquid.
That is not the same as saying the business is broken. ARK Research estimated that Hyperliquid and Pump.fun together accounted for 67% of all crypto application revenue as of July 31. Grayscale has compared Hyperliquid to Amazon Web Services, where outside developers build products and the operator takes a cut of what is traded.
Still, CoinDesk argued that the comparison also exposes the issue. Hyperliquid booked roughly $45 million in gross revenue during the first four weeks of the third quarter of 2026. If that pace holds, the quarter would finish near $150 million, marking another decline and leaving less support underneath HYPE.