HYPE Revenue Keeps Falling Even as Hyperliquid Trading Hits Records

Hyperliquid revenue has fallen for four straight quarters

Hyperliquid's gross protocol revenue has fallen for four consecutive quarters, even as the decentralised exchange attracts record trading demand. Revenue peaked at about $357 million in the third quarter of 2025. It then slipped to roughly $295 million, then about $217 million, and reached about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026. That marks a 43% decline from the peak. The decline came as activity climbed, with total open interest reaching a record near $11 billion on 13 July 2026. Thirty-day perpetual trading volume reached about $178 billion.

A builder fee-sharing program is redirecting trading fees

The gap between rising activity and falling revenue traces to HIP-3, a program Hyperliquid launched in October 2025. The program lets anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE deploy a perpetual futures market on the platform's order books. Those builders then keep up to half of the trading fees their markets generate. The stake is worth about $27 million at recent prices. At the start of 2026, builder-deployed markets made up about 2% of perpetual volume. They now account for roughly half of it. As a result, Hyperliquid keeps a smaller share of the fees it helps produce. Cost of revenue rose from under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025 to 18% a year later.

Real-world asset perps now lead Hyperliquid trading volume

Much of the new activity comes from real-world asset perpetuals. These contracts track prices for assets such as oil, gold, and individual stocks, rather than cryptocurrencies. These contracts let traders bet on moves in traditional markets without leaving the exchange. They reached a record $3.6 billion in open interest in July 2026, up from about $2.6 billion in May. During the week of 13 July, they made up more than half of weekly trading volume. That pushed them past crypto-based derivatives to become the platform's largest single segment.

HYPE trades near $54 at time of publication

HYPE traded at $54.04 at the time of publication, down about 29.7% from its all-time high of $76.76 set on 16 June 2026 (CoinPaprika, 10 August 2026). The token's market value stood at roughly $12 billion, with about 222 million tokens in circulation (CoinPaprika, 10 August 2026). Its market capitalisation ranks HYPE among the ten largest cryptocurrencies.

Token buybacks that support HYPE have shrunk sharply

Lower revenue also weakens a key support for the HYPE token. Hyperliquid routes about 97% of its trading fees into an Assistance Fund. That fund buys HYPE on the open market and permanently removes it from supply, which has retired roughly 44.5 million tokens so far. The buyback shrank from about $290 million in the third quarter of 2025 to roughly $149 million in the second quarter of 2026, a decline of about 51%. As more fees flow to outside builders, the fund has less money to spend on reducing the token's supply.

The core protocol captures less of a larger market

By one measure, HYPE trades at about 16 times its annualised protocol earnings of roughly $785 million, based on circulating market value. On a fully diluted basis, that multiple rises to about 70 times. The result is a growing split: Hyperliquid's markets are busier than ever, while the fees reaching the core protocol and its buyback keep shrinking. HYPE also dominates its own network, holding nearly all the value across the ecosystem's tracked tokens.