Key Takeaways
- HYPE hit a record $67.24 on May 29 after the CFTC cleared the first U.S. perpetual futures contract.
- Grayscale says Hyperliquid earned about $800 million in fees in 2025, pressuring rival exchanges.
- A spot HYPE ETF decision from the SEC, filed as GHYP on May 22, is the next catalyst traders are watching.
A Record Built on Regulatory Relief
HYPE, the native token of the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, touched roughly $67.24 during Friday trading, extending a rally that had carried it past a previous peak near $64 only a week earlier. The gain capped one of the strongest stretches yet for a derivatives venue that barely existed three years ago.
The immediate catalyst came from Washington, as on May 28, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approved the first perpetual futures contract (a derivative that tracks an asset’s price with no expiry date) on a regulated U.S. exchange, clearing KalshiEX’s bitcoin-linked product.
Hyperliquid was not named in the approval, and the CFTC signaled separately that it would permit certain perpetual products at Coinbase. Even so, traders read the ruling as a green light for the wider category, where Hyperliquid is by far the largest decentralized player. The optimism was amplified when the head of the New York Stock Exchange publicly endorsed the platform, a rare crossover nod from the heart of traditional finance.
Grayscale Calls It a Breakout
Sentiment drew a second lift from Grayscale because earlier in the week, the asset manager published a research report titled “Hyperliquid Breaks the Mold,” calling the protocol “the breakout success story of the modern digital assets industry” and arguing it could scale into an exchange-sized business while preserving the transparency and self-custody of decentralized finance ( DeFi).
The figures behind that claim are large. Grayscale said Hyperliquid processed about $2.9 trillion in perpetual volume in 2025 and holds roughly $7 billion in open interest, ranking it among the biggest perpetual futures exchanges of any kind. The HYPE token, which accrues value from trading fees, captured around $800 million in fees over the year.
Grayscale also wants to package that exposure for mainstream investors. It filed a third amended registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 22 for a spot Hyperliquid exchange-traded fund (ETF) under the ticker GHYP, a structure designed to route onchain staking yield into the fund. Rival issuer 21shares launched its own Hyperliquid ETF on May 12, giving the token two prospective Wall Street wrappers in a single month.
Why Traders Keep Piling In
Hyperliquid runs a fully onchain order book for perpetual futures, offering around-the-clock trading, deep liquidity, and fast execution of a centralized venue without asking users to hand over custody of their coins. That blend has made it the default home for onchain derivatives traders and the benchmark rivals are measured against.
The platform also leans on aggressive tokenomics, directing a share of fees toward buying back HYPE, a mechanism that tightens supply as volume climbs. Demand has been visible on the ledger as wallets that analysts link to venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) have stacked tens of millions of dollars in HYPE since mid-April.
The next test is whether regulatory clarity converts into durable institutional flows. The CFTC’s perpetuals decision and the pending GHYP and 21shares funds hand U.S. allocators their first compliant routes into a market they had mostly watched from the sidelines. A green light for a spot HYPE ETF would place Hyperliquid on a short list of tokens with both a working business and an exchange-listed wrapper.
For now, the token’s fundamentals and regulatory backdrop point in the same direction. Whether HYPE can hold above $67 will hinge on follow-through from those institutional channels as well as on whether the leverage that fueled the run unwinds as fast as it built.
