TechFlowPost published a long-form interview from The Rollup featuring Ryan Watkins on the current digital-asset bull market, Hyperliquid’s expansion path, and the broader shift toward on-chain financial platforms that aim to trade far more than crypto-native assets.
Watkins said one of the most dramatic recent moments came when Donald Trump mentioned Hyperliquid during a live televised press conference. At the time, he said, he was sitting in the same place and speaking with co-founder Dan when messages from the team started pouring in, telling him HYPE had jumped to around $70. Just a few minutes earlier, he had seen it trading near $59. The move looked almost vertical, and he said they did not know the reason at first. They later learned that Trump had referred to Hyperliquid publicly on air.
Stars, HIP-3 and the U.S. market setup
Watkins said Hyperliquid had already deployed Stars-related features to the public testnet back in July and August. In his view, the team typically pushes major functionality to the public testnet only when it wants users to begin testing and preparing for launch. Based on the data his team tracks, Hyperliquid usually takes about three months to move from public testnet to mainnet, and no more than six months. That led them to believe the next phase was already in motion and getting close.
He said they did not expect senior political figures to mention the project in public, but they did believe the strategy for U.S. expansion was taking shape. For a long time, the biggest investor concern around Hyperliquid was straightforward: the growth metrics looked strong, but what would happen if U.S. regulators restricted access? Watkins said that overhang is now starting to fade. Because the U.S. capital market remains the world’s largest and most important liquidity center, clearing that hurdle would materially raise Hyperliquid’s growth ceiling.
From on-chain leader to an “exchange for everything”
Looking back at the initial investment case, Watkins said the thesis was fairly simple in the early days. Hyperliquid was valued at about $3 billion, generating roughly $200 million in annualized revenue, and still showing a steep growth trajectory. Aside from airdrop recipients, there was almost no freely circulating supply. The only way to acquire the token was to bridge assets into Hyperliquid itself. He described that structure as strategically powerful because any fund or individual that wanted to build a position had to use the product first, bringing real users onto the platform. He also stressed that no institutions had access to pre-arranged cheap allocations.
At that stage, he said, Hyperliquid was already one of the top four applications and chains in the industry by revenue, while several assets ahead of it did not appear to have durable fundamentals. He believed the market was still leaving a great deal of room for re-rating, to the point that even a 3x to 5x move would not have fully closed the valuation gap.
But Watkins said the larger thesis was never just about an on-chain perpetuals venue. The real idea was an “exchange for everything” built on a permissionless chain, where users could freely trade global assets and where derivatives would remain a central long-term product category. By early 2025, after deeper conversations with core trading teams and market-making firms, he said he developed a much stronger conviction that the position could be held over a generational time frame.
He argued that the market often makes a category mistake by treating on-chain perpetuals as a niche Web3 competition for existing crypto users. In his view, the actual target is much larger. The first step is to take share from leading centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, Bybit and BN. The endgame is to compete with traditional financial giants such as CME. For that reason, one of the key data series his team has tracked is not just share against on-chain peers, but Hyperliquid’s share relative to BN and Bybit. He said that measure has continued to rise and repeatedly set new highs.
Portfolio margin, spot markets and compliance rails
Watkins said the thesis has become more concrete as several pieces have come together: a full portfolio margin system, spot markets, HIP-3, and compliance-oriented structures including regulated HIP-3 and HIP-4. Taken together, he said, these are the foundations of a platform that could let users post almost any major asset as full collateral and trade almost any financial instrument from anywhere in the world.
That model, he said, reflects a structural advantage unique to blockchain architecture: global assets can be cleared on a single permissionless base ledger. He added that this vision is still in a very early stage of realization. Even if one looks only at perpetuals, Hyperliquid’s penetration into the global CFD market or retail options market is still below 1%. Even so, the platform is already producing striking cash flow and protocol revenue.
For Watkins, the key point is that investors should not let short-term monthly fluctuations dominate the analysis when a system has strong internal compounding power. He contrasted the current phase of the crypto market with earlier periods that were driven by circular liquidity and cyclical speculation, where narratives could collapse quickly during macro pullbacks. What matters now, he said, is that the number of real users settling on-chain and the scale of those transactions are compounding year after year, while base-layer protocols are capturing more real business income.
The metrics he watches most closely
Watkins said no single metric is enough to evaluate a system like Hyperliquid. Instead, he looks at a broader operating dashboard that includes:
- changes in market share relative to top venues including BN, Coinbase and Bybit;
- the platform’s penetration into global CFD, futures and options volumes;
- absolute growth in trading volume and compounded growth in retained net protocol revenue;
- net deposit flows and growth in average on-chain account net worth.
As long as those underlying business metrics keep compounding, he said, short-term price volatility in the secondary market matters much less because the system’s intrinsic value floor keeps moving higher.
A barbell strategy: cash-flow businesses and store-of-value assets
The hosts said their own allocation framework uses a barbell structure. On one side are on-chain businesses with self-sustaining economics, large long-term addressable markets and durable token models. On the other side are pure store-of-value assets. Their core exposure includes Bitcoin, gold and HYPE, while they have expanded selectively into applications that generate real cash flow and excluded infrastructure projects with weak moats as well as oversupplied L1 and L2 middle layers.
Watkins said he broadly agrees with that framing. In his view, the industry narrative is being reshaped by high-quality on-chain businesses that function as profit machines. In traditional finance, the purpose of an enterprise is to turn capital into real earnings. Crypto spent years detached from that basic idea, relying instead on inflated liquidity metrics and attention games to support valuation. As macro conditions changed, digital assets stopped being the only outlet for global excess liquidity, and protocols now have to prove that they deserve to be held.
He added that real revenue is only one expression of healthy fundamentals, not the only one. Some businesses choose to retain all generated cash flow and reinvest it into ecosystem expansion rather than distributing it to token holders immediately. Watkins pointed to Morpho, saying its loan balances and real demand have continued to grow in a hockey-stick pattern, and that the decision to keep reinvesting instead of turning on a fee switch can be entirely rational during a high-growth phase.
Hyperliquid, he said, follows a different model, using transparent on-chain smart contracts to carry out buybacks and burns in a programmatic way, which he compared to Ethereum-style deflationary settlement logic. The core question in either case is the same: is the system creating positive total economic value on an ongoing basis? He said that growing divergence in fundamentals should make it easier for capital to identify the businesses that are actually working.
Bitcoin, Zcash and the harsh economics of store-of-value markets
On the store-of-value side of the barbell, Watkins said the competitive dynamic is extremely unforgiving and tends toward winner-take-most outcomes. He pointed to monetary and precious-metal history, where gold commands the overwhelming majority of value measured in the tens of trillions of dollars, silver sits far behind, and the tiers below that retain little monetary premium. In a global, permissionless blockchain market, he said, that power-law dynamic is likely to be even stronger, leaving only one or two durable store-of-value assets over time.
He said Bitcoin has already secured its central role through its first-mover advantage, the hard cap of 21 million coins, and its global liquidity network. If another asset were to qualify as a meaningful complementary contender, he argued, it would be more likely to come from a top smart-contract network with the largest pool of real economic activity, deepest liquidity and strongest collateral demand, rather than from a single-purpose fork designed to mimic older monetary properties.
As for Zcash, Watkins said the project’s early cypherpunk roots carried a strong idealistic streak, but that vision became more marginal through successive market cycles. Some parts of the market are trying to reintroduce it as an institutional-grade “private Bitcoin” narrative, he said, yet actual on-chain behavior suggests very little capital is really using it as a high-frequency privacy currency or as an everyday unit of value storage.
His argument is that privacy is fundamentally a functional module, one that can be implemented within the technology stack of general-purpose smart-contract chains through upgrades. Without overwhelming liquidity depth, he said, the market does not need a second Bitcoin with overlapping positioning. Monetary systems have powerful network externalities, and once those effects consolidate at the top, they keep reinforcing themselves in a nonlinear way.
Social trading and the new on-chain financial spectacle
The interview also turned to social trading. The hosts referenced a recent essay by Watkins in which he described the current on-chain trading ecosystem as the world’s largest MMORPG. Watkins said Hyperliquid, Pump and Solana all point to the same underlying truth: open trading that runs around the clock, is available globally and has a low barrier to entry is still the clearest killer application for blockchain technology. Once anyone can issue and trade assets with low friction, large-scale financial games emerge naturally as speculation evolves.
Speculation, he said, is not a temporary distortion that disappears when a cycle ends. It is embedded in the history of finance. What has changed is the product structure. In the past, social trading was fragmented. Users discussed trades on conventional social platforms, posted screenshots as proof of performance, and then tried to mirror positions through messy cross-platform workflows. Today, that experience is being integrated into a native on-chain loop.
Because the ledger is transparent and tamper-resistant, he said, any account’s profit and loss history, position changes and entry points can be cryptographically verified. At the same time, smart contracts can execute copy-trading instructions atomically and in sync. That combination of verifiability and real-time settlement is a structural advantage that centralized platforms cannot easily reproduce.
Watkins noted that earlier cycles also produced stories of outsized wealth, but the lack of a unified identity layer meant many successful traders remained little more than anonymous addresses. Now, with transparent ledgers tied to persistent on-chain identity, individuals displaying tens of millions of dollars in public PnL can become highly transmissible financial personalities. That attracts both capital and attention into the ecosystem for liquidity matching and strategy following.
He said meme-asset speculation in low-liquidity markets remains cyclical and zero-sum in many cases. Social trading as a product category, though, has much broader commercial range. Meme assets may serve as an efficient wedge to pull mass users on-chain, but the same structure can extend into more mature perpetuals, tokenized equity-like assets and even traditional financial derivatives as infrastructure improves.
Creator incentives and “finance as content”
The hosts argued that this model is also reshaping creator economics. Older crypto speculation often depended on paywalled communities and copy-trading scams, while real-time, verifiable on-chain PnL is now replacing marketing rhetoric as a more objective measure of trader credibility. Dynamic leaderboards and creator rewards, they said, are also pulling in both retail users and market-making capital.
Watkins described creator rewards as a compliant, modernized upgrade to the old paid-community business model. In the earlier version, a lack of performance auditing often allowed people with no real trading skill to sell anxiety to less-informed users. Under transparent on-chain conditions, by contrast, a trader’s income and reputation are tied directly to whether the strategy actually works and whether it converts users.
Top traders once worried that making strategies public would erode their alpha, he said. Now, protocols can route trading fees and creator incentives back to them at scale, creating a more predictable income stream that can even exceed the profit variation of their own positions. Watkins said some leading platforms now distribute rewards to high-quality strategy creators in the millions of dollars each week, with annualized capital retention above $100 million. Under that model, top strategy providers can make millions of dollars from creator revenue sharing alone.
He said the effects are spilling over into the wider ecosystem. Beyond standard revenue sharing for token deployers, leading on-chain traders are getting platform and off-platform commercial partnerships, dedicated market-making support and invitations to major in-person events, all of which push them toward super-brand status as individuals. He also argued that the same framework can apply to many other categories of financial expertise, from senior analysts focused on fixed-income protocols to prediction-market strategists and specialists in tokenized real-world-asset allocation.
Watkins closed by saying that in a deeply connected digital world, “finance as content” is becoming an explicit trend. Even users who do not actively engage in frequent leveraged trading may still log in every day because volatile on-chain assets, publicly verifiable wealth shifts and intense long-short competition are compelling forms of content in their own right. As more asset classes are pulled into unified on-chain settlement, he said, that growth curve is only beginning to show itself.
The interview ended with the hosts thanking Watkins for his views on Hyperliquid, on-chain trading, store-of-value assets and social finance. Watkins responded that he appreciated the invitation and looked forward to continuing the discussion another time.
