Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures market has reached record scale, but the platform is retaining a shrinking share of the fees generated by that activity as third-party market deployers take a larger role in its order book.
Open interest on Hyperliquid exceeded $11 billion on July 13, while 30-day perpetual futures volume approached $178 billion, according to the figures cited in the supplied data. The venue’s share of global perpetual futures open interest rose to roughly 9%, up from less than 7% at the end of May.
The rapid increase has been led by non-crypto perpetual contracts tied to real-world assets, including crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, Nasdaq-100-linked products and SpaceX. Open interest in those contracts reached $3.6 billion this month, putting RWA perpetuals ahead of Bitcoin-linked markets on Hyperliquid by that measure.
Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized equities and commodities produced $25 billion in trading volume, or 52% of total activity on the platform for the week. It marked the first week in which non-crypto perpetuals generated more volume than cryptocurrency perpetuals on the venue.
Revenue has declined as third parties capture more fees
The volume growth has not translated into higher protocol revenue. DeFiLlama data show Hyperliquid revenue peaked at about $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 before declining to roughly $295 million, $217 million and $202 million in the following three quarters. The second-quarter 2026 result was about 43% below the peak despite an increase in transaction counts.
The divergence is closely connected to HIP-3, a proposal implemented in October 2025 that opened Hyperliquid’s perpetual market infrastructure to outside deployers. Under the framework, a party staking 500,000 HYPE can launch its own perpetual market on the platform’s order book. At a HYPE price near $55, that stake is worth around $28 million.
HIP-3 deployers can receive as much as 50% of the trading fees produced by markets they operate. The arrangement gives Hyperliquid a way to expand its catalogue of contracts without the core protocol selecting and managing every market, but it also reduces the share of fee income remaining in the protocol treasury or associated buyback mechanisms.
Externally deployed markets represented around 2% of perpetual volume at the beginning of 2026. Their share has since climbed to nearly 50%, according to the supplied figures. Over roughly the same period, fees paid to developers, market makers and a liquidity vault rose from 6% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2025 to 18% in the second quarter of 2026.
Developer fees routed through trading front ends, including Phantom, totaled about $16 million in the second quarter. Those payments were treated as pass-through costs to external parties, reinforcing the difference between gross trading activity and fee revenue kept by the protocol.
Trade.xyz dominates the new market structure
The expansion of HIP-3 has also concentrated market activity in a single major deployer. Trade.xyz accounts for more than 90% of open interest created under the mechanism, based on the figures provided.
That concentration places substantial weight on the deployer’s choices over price oracles, margin requirements and liquidation parameters. In conventional crypto perpetual markets, these settings can determine how a contract responds when liquidity is thin or the underlying asset is not trading during its primary market hours.
A recent move in an SK Hynix-linked perpetual illustrated those risks. A large trade in the relatively thin market during Korean pre-market hours was followed by a 19% decline and forced liquidations, according to the supplied account. Trade.xyz later agreed to compensate affected users.
The incident does not erase the demand for perpetual exposure to equities and commodities, which has become a major source of Hyperliquid’s volume. It does show that the platform’s newest and fastest-growing segment carries different market-structure risks than highly liquid Bitcoin and Ethereum contracts. A contract linked to a public company can remain available around the clock on-chain even when the underlying equity market is closed, leaving pricing more dependent on oracle design and available liquidity.
Buyback capacity has fallen with protocol revenue
Lower retained revenue has also reduced the funds flowing into Hyperliquid’s assistance fund, which directs about 97% of its trading-fee intake toward buying back and burning HYPE. The fund has removed roughly 44.5 million HYPE from supply so far.
Buyback volume fell from nearly $290 million in the third quarter of 2025 to about $149 million in the second quarter of 2026, according to the supplied figures. That decline tracks the reduction in protocol revenue, even as the platform’s volume and open interest set new highs.
HYPE traded near $55 last Friday after falling about 5% over the week and roughly 28% from its June 16 high near $77. Using annualized revenue of around $785 million, the supplied valuation estimate placed the token at about 16 times earnings based on circulating market capitalization and roughly 70 times earnings on a fully diluted basis.
The fully diluted calculation has become more relevant ahead of scheduled token releases. Nearly 10 million HYPE, valued at about $550 million at prices near $55, was due to unlock for core contributors on August 6. Additional monthly releases are scheduled through 2027, while circulating supply stood at about 222 million tokens in the supplied data.
Hyperliquid’s revenue remains unusually concentrated
Despite the decline from its 2025 peak, Hyperliquid remains one of the largest revenue-generating crypto applications. ARK Research said that Hyperliquid and Pump.fun accounted for 67% of total crypto-application revenue as of July 31.
ARK Research estimated Hyperliquid generated about $45 million during the first four weeks of the third quarter of 2026. If that pace persists through the quarter, revenue would approach $150 million, below the $202 million reported for the preceding quarter.
The figures frame Hyperliquid’s current challenge: its market infrastructure is attracting substantial demand for on-chain perpetual exposure to traditional assets, while the same model channels an increasing portion of fee income to external deployers and trading interfaces. Future revenue performance will depend less on headline volume alone than on whether the protocol can preserve enough of the economics from those markets as HIP-3 activity expands.
Explore how tokenized stocks reshape derivatives and RWA markets in 2026—read our deep dive on tokenised stocks attracting crypto users.
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