Kain Warwick Says Hyperliquid’s 50% Fee Split With Market Builders Is Unlikely to Hold
Kain Warwick, founder of Infinex and Synthetix, said Hyperliquid’s current arrangement with outside market builders looks hard to sustain. Speaking on the August 12 episode of Unchained’s Uneasy Money, Warwick argued that letting builders keep as much as 50% of trading fees is unusually generous and will probably change over time. He pointed to his own experience at Synthetix, where market makers pushed for larger economics but fee sharing never reached those levels. The issue matters because Hyperliquid sends nearly all of its own share of trading fees, about 99% after the builders’ cut, to an Assistance Fund that buys back HYPE. DefiLlama data cited in the report shows gross revenue fell from about $357 million in Q3 2025 to roughly $202 million in Q2 2026 even as volume held up, while quarterly buybacks dropped from nearly $290 million to about $149 million. HIP-3 markets, many tied to tokenized real-world assets, have grown from around 2% of platform volume at the start of 2026 to about half today. Warwick also flagged concentration risk. One builder, trade.xyz, accounts for more than 90% of HIP-3 open interest, and tokenized real-world-asset perpetuals reached a record $3.6 billion in open interest in July, overtaking bitcoin on the platform.
