Hyperliquid’s RWA Perps Surge Tests the Revenue Behind HYPE

Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures business is seeing record demand from real-world asset markets, but the growth is reducing the share of revenue that stays with the protocol. CoinDesk reported that open interest on the platform rose above $11 billion on July 13, its highest level of 2026, while gross protocol revenue has fallen for four straight quarters from a 2025 peak of roughly $357 million to about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026.

The shift matters because HYPE’s token economics are closely tied to the exchange’s earnings. Hyperliquid routes about 97% of trading fees into its Assistance Fund, which buys HYPE on the open market and retires it. As revenue falls, that buyback support shrinks: the fund bought nearly $290 million of HYPE in the third quarter of 2025, compared with roughly $149 million in the second quarter of 2026.

A major reason is HIP-3, a system that lets outside builders deploy perpetual futures markets on Hyperliquid if they stake 500,000 HYPE. Those builders can keep up to half of trading fees, and their markets have grown from about 2% of Hyperliquid perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly half today. Cost of revenue has also increased, rising from under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025 to 18% a year later.

Real-world asset perps are the main driver. Contracts linked to assets such as crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker and pre-IPO names including SpaceX reached a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month and overtook bitcoin as Hyperliquid’s largest market by that measure. Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities generated $25 billion in volume, or 52% of the weekly total.

The concentration also introduces risk. Trade.xyz accounts for more than 90% of HIP-3 open interest, meaning much of Hyperliquid’s recent growth depends on one deployer’s market design, oracle choices and risk controls. CoinDesk noted that a thin pre-market trade in Korea recently pushed Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract down 19%, triggering liquidations that the firm later agreed to reimburse.

HYPE faces additional pressure from token unlocks, institutional selling, regulatory scrutiny and competition. CoinDesk reported that nearly 10 million HYPE unlocked to core contributors on Aug. 6, while Singapore’s MAS added Hyperliquid to its investor alert list in late June after earlier U.K. warnings. The platform remains a major crypto revenue generator, but its recent growth shows a tension between wider market activity and the earnings that underpin HYPE’s buyback model.