TradeXYZ’s growing dominance inside Hyperliquid has pushed a once-fringe question into the center of crypto market debate: could it eventually leave Hyperliquid and build a trading venue of its own?
Odaily frames the discussion around a recent post on X by former Messari researcher Sam, who said investors bullish on HYPE because of the boom in RWA perpetuals should ask themselves three questions: if TradeXYZ leaves Hyperliquid and launches its own exchange, where will users trade; if TradeXYZ launches its own stock or token, what happens to HYPE’s valuation; and how likely are either of those outcomes. The article says the post drew more than 470,000 views within days.
In Odaily’s telling, the reason the topic accelerated so quickly is simple. More market participants have started to notice that the balance of value inside the TradeXYZ-Hyperliquid relationship is shifting, and that TradeXYZ is building stronger influence and bargaining power than before.
The article places that shift in a broader business pattern: when one side in a partnership gains more resources and market power while the split of economic benefits looks increasingly uneven, breakups become easier to imagine.
Odaily uses an AI-sector analogy to make the point. Cursor, once the largest AI coding product in the market, relied on Anthropic’s Claude model. The partnership looked strong until Anthropic released Claude Code, a direct competitor to Cursor. By mid-2026, the article says, Claude Code’s ARR had surpassed Cursor’s.
Crypto has its own versions of this pattern. Odaily points to products that grew large on top of existing infrastructure and later moved to build their own ecosystems, citing Uniswap and dYdX. It also notes that Polymarket, one of this cycle’s most talked-about projects, has repeatedly been rumored to be weighing a move away from Polygon toward independent infrastructure.
Why the market thinks TradeXYZ has enough leverage to go solo
Odaily argues that in crypto, it is common for a project to start on an existing chain or infrastructure layer, scale there, and then consider building its own infrastructure for better performance, tighter control, stronger fee capture, or a larger valuation narrative. On that measure, TradeXYZ is already big enough to fit the template.
Citing flowscan, the article says Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 market has processed more than $469.62 billion in total trading volume so far, with TradeXYZ contributing more than $437.4 billion, or 93%. As of the time of writing, total HIP-3 open interest stood at $3.9 billion, of which TradeXYZ accounted for more than $3.8 billion, or 99.7%.
That leaves the rest of the field with less than 10% combined share, according to the article. Odaily’s conclusion is blunt: HIP-3 has already developed a heavy winner-takes-most dynamic, and calling the market effectively controlled by TradeXYZ would not be an exaggeration. In that framing, the valuation premium attached to Hyperliquid’s onchain RWA derivatives story is, to a large extent, a premium created by TradeXYZ.
The article also argues that TradeXYZ is no longer optional to Hyperliquid from either a valuation or protocol-revenue perspective. It cites official data showing that HIP-3 now makes up 71.92% of Hyperliquid’s total trading volume, a record high. Given TradeXYZ’s dominance in HIP-3, that would imply TradeXYZ alone contributes more than 70% of Hyperliquid’s total trading volume. HIP-3 also accounts for 36% of Hyperliquid’s total open interest, which in turn implies TradeXYZ contributes more than 35% of platform-wide OI.
Odaily’s broader point is that TradeXYZ has used Hyperliquid’s infrastructure to grow into a business large enough to influence traditional financial markets, and that its leverage inside the partnership is no longer marginal. It is now central.
The clearest reason to split: fee capture
Leaving aside capital-markets factors such as financing and token issuance, which the article says are harder to read, Odaily argues that the most practical commercial reason for TradeXYZ to go independent would be a push to capture more of the underlying fees.
Under Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 structure, TradeXYZ and Hyperliquid split trading fees 50/50. Odaily adds that because the standard trading fee for HIP-3 assets is twice that of the core perpetual market, Hyperliquid ends up earning protocol fees from each HIP-3 trade that are equivalent to what it makes in the core perp market.
By Odaily’s calculation, TradeXYZ had generated nearly $50 million in total fee revenue as of publication. Under the current split, it could retain at most about $25 million.
The article argues that it is hard to view that as ideal for a project that has already driven more than $400 billion in trading volume. In Odaily’s reading, surrendering close to half of the revenue to a partner would be difficult for most teams to accept. Given TradeXYZ’s current leverage over Hyperliquid’s growth story, the article says it would have room to negotiate for a more favorable split, such as 70/30 or better. If those talks failed, a move toward independence could become much easier to imagine.
Why Odaily thinks TradeXYZ is still unlikely to leave
Even so, the article lays out several factors that keep the odds of a split low.
1. Hyperliquid’s performance remains hard to replace
TradeXYZ’s perpetual contracts run on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 platform, where matching, order types, funds, liquidation, and auto-deleveraging are managed by HyperCore. Technically, Odaily says, the pieces controlled by TradeXYZ are largely oracle prices, mark prices, external prices, and related components.
That matters because going solo would require TradeXYZ to build its own base-layer infrastructure. Hiring a team is one thing. Reproducing an L1 with performance comparable to Hyperliquid in a short period is another.
Odaily cites a March 2024 post on X from TradeXYZ founder Shoku, who said he was unsure how large Hyperliquid as an L1 would become by traditional metrics such as TVL and trading volume, but fully believed the quality and rigor of Hyperliquid’s onchain products and dApps would have no rival across crypto.
That set of rivals would naturally include TradeXYZ itself. The article’s point is that if TradeXYZ built infrastructure that could not match Hyperliquid, the user experience of its product, along with its narrative around price discovery ahead of traditional finance, would take a hit.
2. Hyperliquid is not just infrastructure. It is the main distribution channel
The second restraint is distribution. Odaily compares the setup to the relationship between Circle and Coinbase. Circle is willing to hand over more than 50% of USDC savings revenue to Coinbase because Coinbase plays a major role in distributing and promoting USDC. The article cites Coinbase’s latest Q2 earnings report, which said more than 30% of circulating USDC is held on Coinbase.
Odaily argues that the same logic applies here. At a basic level, Hyperliquid’s frontend is only one way to access TradeXYZ’s liquidity market, not the only way. Users can already access that market directly on TradeXYZ’s own website, where the trading interface closely resembles Hyperliquid’s. To make switching easier, TradeXYZ’s internal account system is also connected with Hyperliquid’s: a user connecting the same wallet on the TradeXYZ site can directly use balances already held on Hyperliquid.
But the article says that even with its own frontend in place, most of TradeXYZ’s more than 350,000 trading users still access its liquidity market through Hyperliquid’s frontend. That habit has been built over time and is not easy to change quickly. Odaily adds that a portion of users may not even clearly distinguish between TradeXYZ and Hyperliquid, choosing the product by default because they trust the Hyperliquid brand.
So in Odaily’s assessment, Hyperliquid does more than supply technology. It is also the main route through which TradeXYZ’s liquidity is distributed. The cost and time needed to build infrastructure can be estimated; the value lost from giving up distribution is much harder to measure.
3. The founders have a long history of trust
The third restraint is the relationship between the two teams’ founders. Solana KOL Ansem said the odds of TradeXYZ going independent are close to zero. His reasoning, as quoted by Odaily, is that TradeXYZ and Hyperliquid are among the most compatible teams in crypto, and that “the two founders aren’t greedy at all, and they’re both very smart. I believe they can choose a path that is best for both teams.”
Odaily says that view is not without support. Shoku was one of the earliest investors to back Hyperliquid. As early as 2023, he had already connected with Jeff and started contributing to the Hyperliquid ecosystem. In 2024, he developed Unit, Hyperliquid’s Bitcoin bridge. The article also says Shoku once told friends that Hyperliquid was one of the few things in crypto that genuinely excited him.
Those details lead Odaily to a softer but important conclusion: Shoku appears to hold both Hyperliquid and Jeff in high regard, which lowers the chance of what the market would read as a betrayal.
If a split still happened, Odaily says both sides would likely lose
The article does not stop at probability. It also walks through the low-probability case in which TradeXYZ really leaves and builds independently.
Its answer is clear: both sides would probably end up worse off.
Odaily argues that the current setup is a win-win arrangement. A breakup would inject major uncertainty into both businesses. Hyperliquid could choose to support other HIP-3 market participants if TradeXYZ left, but the relationship would shift from cooperation to competition. Odaily says the direct hit to Hyperliquid’s revenue might not be overwhelming because more than 70% of its primary revenue still comes from core perps and HIP-3 remains a smaller piece. The bigger damage, in the article’s view, would be to valuation.
Its scenario analysis says that if TradeXYZ migrated away, Hyperliquid’s total trading volume would fall by more than 50%, and HYPE could also face a halving. The reason is narrative as much as numbers: Hyperliquid would no longer be the leading onchain RWA perpetual trading venue, and would instead be recast as a crypto derivatives platform that had lost its biggest growth engine and the story supporting it.
TradeXYZ would not emerge unscathed either. Odaily says it would have to build infrastructure and user behavior from scratch, with performance and distribution becoming the main constraints on growth. On top of that, a move seen as turning on a close partner could trigger public backlash and weaken its credibility.
There is also the wider competitive field. TradeXYZ and Hyperliquid are not competing only with each other. Other players are already active across the broader RWA trading market. Hyperliquid would need time to cultivate new HIP-3 participants, while TradeXYZ would need time to build fresh infrastructure. By the time either side was ready, Odaily argues, rivals could have moved in and filled the gap.
That is where the article lands. Even as TradeXYZ becomes more important to Hyperliquid, going independent still looks irrational in Odaily’s assessment. If TradeXYZ wants stronger profitability, the better route may be to preserve the integration advantages it already has with Hyperliquid while gradually shifting more focus toward its own issuance strategy and user ownership.