Hyperliquid’s HYPE Token Skyrockets 101%: Unpacking the Forces Behind Its Meteoric Rise

Hyperliquid’s native token HYPE has soared 101% this year, while Bitcoin has fallen 12% over the same timeframe, underscoring a growing split that Wall Street is beginning to notice.

HYPE’s upward momentum appears poised to persist, with users on the prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, assigning an 85% probability that the token will hit $52 in May, a sharp jump from just 14% on May 15. The token is currently trading at $51.26, less than 2% away from that milestone, according to CoinGecko data.

HYPE’s break from Bitcoin’s trend mirrors Hyperliquid’s evolution from a crypto perpetuals exchange into a broader platform focused on real-world assets, pre-IPO markets, and global financial infrastructure, market observers say.

Matt Hougan, CIO of Bitwise, made the case that the platform is undervalued in a tweet on Monday, pointing out that it’s going after the “$600 trillion global asset market.” He added, “Hyperliquid is not a crypto app. It’s a super app.”

The market is treating Bitcoin and HYPE as entirely separate bets, according to Matthew Pinnock, COO at Altura DeFi. “Bitcoin is increasingly acting like a macro reserve asset, so its price movements are heavily influenced by Fed rates, ETF flows, and overall liquidity conditions,” he told Decrypt.

By contrast, HYPE is being valued more like “high-growth financial infrastructure,” with the exchange “soaking up volume across perpetuals, commodities, equities, and broader tokenized macro markets at a pace the market didn’t anticipate this early.”

Key Hyperliquid drivers

The explosive growth is evident in Hyperliquid’s fee revenue. It has quietly risen to become crypto’s top fee generator, bringing in $255 million in revenue so far this year, more than the next two platforms combined, Cam Khosravi, research analyst at Bitwise, posted on Monday.

It accounts for roughly one-third of all revenue among the top 10 protocols. Nearly all of that income comes from perpetual trading fees, and about 97% flows back to HYPE holders via automated open-market buybacks. The platform now captures 43% of all on-chain fees, or around $11 million per week.

The divergence boils down to product dominance, Andri Fauzan Adziima, research lead at Bitrue Research Institute, told Decrypt, linking HYPE’s strong performance to tokenized perpetuals, including the S&P 500, oil, and commodities, which have seen significant growth in recent weeks amid geopolitical uncertainty. “This TradFi rotation and permissionless market creation give HYPE its own independent

demand engine.”

As a result, real-world asset trading on Hyperliquid hit a record high of $2.6 billion in open interest, twice the figure from two months ago, per the platform’s Monday post.

Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 and IPOs

This growth comes after HIP-3 processed over $120 billion in volume for pre-IPO firms like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. HIP-4, which focuses on structured products and prediction markets, is anticipated to broaden the platform’s market reach even more.

In related news, 21Shares and Bitwise applied for Hyperliquid ETFs last week, with Bitwise going further by pledging to allocate 10% of the fund’s management fee to holding HYPE on its balance sheet.

Adziima anticipates the momentum will persist, driving the token to $55-65, powered by “RWA momentum and ETF inflows.” His long-term vision sees Hyperliquid as a “decentralized super app” for global assets, with “multi-billion-dollar annual revenue potential.”