Everything is starting to align for Hyperliquid… and the market is finally starting to understand it

Introduction

Over the past few weeks, something has clearly started to shift around Hyperliquid. Not just in terms of HYPE price action, now trading at all-time highs against BTC, ETH, and SOL, and only a few percent away from its ATH in dollar terms. But more importantly in the way the market is finally beginning to understand what Hyperliquid is actually building.

For a long time, Hyperliquid was mostly seen as “the perp DEX that works better than the others”. A fast, profitable product with an almost cult-like community and execution quality far above the rest of the industry. But despite that, the protocol was still boxed into the category of “decentralized trading platforms”.

In reality, though, the Hyperliquid thesis has always been far bigger than that. For years, the team has been building around a vision we have consistently supported: becoming the “House of All Finance”. An infrastructure layer capable of gradually absorbing every major financial primitive on-chain.

Perps, spot, stablecoins, tokenized equities and RWAs (HIP-3), options and outcome markets (HIP-4)… every new product launched by Hyperliquid clearly reinforces that direction. And for the first time in a while, it genuinely feels like the market is finally starting to see what has been building in plain sight for months.

The timing is also pretty remarkable. While Bitcoin is down nearly 3% over the past 7 days, HYPE is up more than 48%. At this point, this no longer looks like a simple momentum trade. It looks more like a full market repricing as investors start understanding the real nature of the protocol.

And honestly, when you look at everything that has happened over the past few weeks, it is not hard to understand why. So let’s break down all the recent developments that have created this perfect alignment around Hyperliquid.

Start Trading on Hyperliquid

Trade 100+ perps with up to 40x leverage on a fully decentralized exchange.

---

The SEC announces an “Innovation Exemption” for tokenized stocks

One of the biggest announcements of the past few weeks probably came from the SEC regarding a future “Innovation Exemption”. The stated goal is to make experimentation around tokenized assets and new on-chain financial infrastructure easier, particularly for tokenized equities and secondary markets.

And honestly, the timing almost perfectly lines up with Hyperliquid’s roadmap. For months now, the protocol has quietly been building all the infrastructure needed to support far more than just crypto markets. Between HIP-1, HIP-3, and now HIP-4, Hyperliquid increasingly looks less like a simple DEX and more like a general-purpose financial infrastructure layer.

For a long time, the “House of All Finance” thesis sounded somewhat exaggerated. But as the regulatory backdrop evolves, that vision is starting to look much more credible. The gap between what Hyperliquid is technically building and what regulators may eventually allow is slowly beginning to narrow.

And that is probably one of the things the market is repricing right now. Hyperliquid is no longer just seen as “the best perp DEX”, but as an infrastructure layer that could eventually become compatible with a huge portion of tomorrow’s tokenized finance ecosystem.

---

The SpaceX pre-IPO market launched by TradeXyz

The launch of the SpaceX pre-IPO market through TradeXyz is interesting because it gives a very concrete example of the type of markets Hyperliquid wants to gradually absorb. Unlike platforms offering “tokenized equities” through extremely ambiguous legal structures, Hyperliquid has never claimed to provide actual legal ownership of shares.

The product is simply a perpetual contract allowing traders to speculate on SpaceX’s implied valuation ahead of a potential IPO. That distinction became especially important after recent statements from Anthropic and OpenAI explicitly clarifying that unauthorized representations of their shares do not provide investors with any actual ownership rights.

The entire “tokenized pre-IPO stocks” narrative partially collapsed over the past few weeks. Several OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX-related markets saw sharp corrections after investors realized some platforms had created enormous ambiguity around the idea of “backed exposure”.

Hyperliquid, on the other hand, barely moved. The reason is simple: the protocol is honest about what the product actually is. It does not sell fake legal exposure to private shares. It simply offers a speculative market for trading implied valuation.

The product architecture is also extremely smart. Hyperliquid applies only a 0.005× funding rate multiplier versus 0.5× on standard perps, allowing traders to maintain positions for long periods with relatively low funding costs.

This gradually transforms these markets into real price discovery tools for private companies. And honestly, if this primitive works today for SpaceX, it is easy to imagine what it could become tomorrow for OpenAI, Stripe, or Anthropic.

---

Coinbase and Circle make USDC the reference asset on Hyperliquid

The AQAv2 announcement is probably one of the most economically important developments for Hyperliquid. Coinbase officially becomes the USDC treasury deployer on the protocol, while Circle becomes the technical deployer responsible for CCTP and cross-chain infrastructure.

Both companies are also required to stake HYPE to satisfy AQAv2 conditions. Circle has already staked 500,000 HYPE, roughly $24 million at current prices, and several signs suggest Circle’s TWAP program could begin very soon.

In practical terms, Hyperliquid is now starting to capture a meaningful portion of the yield generated by stablecoin reserves sitting on the network. With roughly $5 billion in USDC already deposited on Hyperliquid and reserve yields between 3% and 3.5%, this could represent more than $150 million in additional annualized revenue for the protocol.

And that changes a lot regarding the quality of the business model. Until now, Hyperliquid primarily depended on trading volumes. Now the protocol is also beginning to directly monetize its liquidity and stablecoin base, making revenues significantly more stable and structural.

But the most interesting part is probably somewhere else. This announcement basically validates the entire original thesis behind the USDH War from September 2025, whose objective was already to reclaim the revenues captured by Circle through the stablecoin reserves sitting on Hyperliquid.

At the time, the Hyperliquid community ultimately chose Native Markets to operate USDH, mainly because of its “Hyperliquid-aligned” positioning. But we explained from day one that the team probably lacked the operational experience required to manage a large-scale stablecoin.

Less than a year later, USDH never truly managed to replace USDC, and Circle ultimately ended up accepting the very economic conditions imposed by Hyperliquid itself. In other words, Hyperliquid managed to force one of the biggest players in the industry to bend on its own turf.

---

HIP-4 and outcome markets as a new financial primitive

The arrival of HIP-4 probably marks the beginning of a new phase for Hyperliquid. To simplify, this infrastructure allows the creation of “canonical outcome markets”, meaning markets whose payoff directly depends on the outcome of an event.

In other words, Hyperliquid is gradually integrating the native building blocks required to support prediction markets, political markets, sports betting markets, and even far more complex conditional structures.

And this is probably where the “House of All Finance” vision becomes really interesting. Because once a protocol becomes capable of natively hosting any type of financial payoff, it slowly stops being just an exchange.

It starts becoming a general financial infrastructure layer. A place where any market can exist, be priced, traded, and used as collateral with the same liquidity, execution engine, and stablecoin layer.

The important point is that Hyperliquid is not building these products as isolated applications sitting “on top” of the protocol. All of these new primitives become native components of the infrastructure itself.

And the more categories of markets Hyperliquid absorbs, the stronger the network effects become. More markets attract more liquidity, which attracts more stablecoins, which then reinforce the depth of every other market. This is precisely the flywheel the market is probably starting to understand today.

---

Spot HYPE ETFs and growing TradFi demand

Institutional demand around HYPE is becoming much more tangible. Obviously, the biggest signal comes from the launch of spot HYPE ETFs this week. First, it is important to remember that Hyperliquid became the fastest crypto asset ever to go from TGE (November 2024) to a spot ETF launch (May 2026).

Right now, two products are driving this demand: 21Shares’ THYP, launched on Nasdaq around May 12, and Bitwise’s BHYP, launched on NYSE on May 15. In just seven days, they recorded roughly $53-54 million in net inflows, including $25.5 million on Wednesday alone.

For an asset still relatively new to institutional portfolios, that is an extremely strong start, as highlighted by Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg.

BHYP is especially interesting because it is the first HYPE ETF with integrated staking through Bitwise Onchain Solutions, with a 0.34% management fee temporarily waived on the first $500 million in assets. Bitwise also announced that 10% of BHYP’s management fees will be used to buy and hold HYPE on its corporate balance sheet through a staking strategy.

And this TradFi interest goes beyond ETFs. Goldman Sachs reportedly sold all of its SOL and XRP ETF positions during Q1 2026 while simultaneously opening exposure to HYPE through PURR, the DAT launched by Hyperliquid Strategies.

Meanwhile, Hyperliquid Strategies recently purchased an additional 271,667 HYPE over 13 days, worth roughly $15.8 million at current prices, while also increasing its cash reserves by $9.6 million to reach $113.8 million. At current prices around $58, this HYPE treasury alone would now represent more than $1 billion.

Between spot ETFs, already meaningful inflows, Bitwise recycling part of its fees into HYPE purchases, Grayscale preparing its own ETF launch, Goldman Sachs repositioning, and Hyperliquid Strategies continuing to aggressively accumulate, traditional finance is gradually starting to understand what the crypto market has been pricing for months.

Hyperliquid is no longer seen as just a “high-performance perp DEX”, but as one of the most profitable and strategically important protocols in the industry. The more the “House of All Finance” thesis materializes, the more Hyperliquid starts being perceived as one of the strongest companies in crypto, and HYPE as the asset designed to benefit from it.

---

Our view

When you connect all of these announcements together, it becomes difficult to still view Hyperliquid as just “a strong perp DEX”. The protocol is gradually absorbing stablecoins, prediction markets, pre-IPO markets, yield infrastructure, and potentially a meaningful portion of tokenized finance.

The most important point is probably that all these building blocks are starting to create a real economic flywheel around HYPE. More markets create more liquidity. More liquidity attracts more stablecoins. And more stablecoins generate more structural revenue that strengthens the entire ecosystem.

For the first time in a long while, it genuinely feels like everything is starting to align simultaneously. The product works, revenues are growing, new primitives are launching, regulation is becoming more favorable, and institutional players are finally beginning to take Hyperliquid seriously.

At OAK Research, we significantly increased our Hyperliquid exposure at the beginning of 2026 precisely because we believed this thesis would eventually materialize. At this point, our position is up more than +178% in less than two months and honestly, we still believe the market is massively underestimating what Hyperliquid could become over the next few years.

→ To follow our positions, allocations, and portfolio moves in real time, everything happens on OAK Premium.

Become Premium

Unlock all our research and get the right insights, at the right time.