Hyperliquid open interest reaches $3B — but can HYPE sustain its $71B valuation?

Executive summary

According to recent market data, Hyperliquid’s native token, HYPE, registered a 44% price rally over a five-day period, reaching an all-time high of $76.90 before consolidating near $73.00. This price appreciation was accompanied by a 32% weekly surge in HYPE futures aggregate open interest, which reached $3 billion. Crucially, this expansion occurred alongside robust trading volume, with Hyperliquid logging $9.6 billion in weekly activity, defying a broader 57% decline in aggregate decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes over the past six months.

This growth is largely attributed to Hyperliquid’s successful integration of traditional finance (TradFi) synthetic perpetuals, including contracts for the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, crude oil, and pre-IPO SpaceX shares. Open interest in these TradFi contracts has reached $2.9 billion, surpassing the platform's Bitcoin open interest of $2 billion. Additionally, newly launched HYPE exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have accumulated $208 million in assets, indicating a growing institutional appetite for the protocol's native asset.

Why it matters

From a market-structure perspective, the divergence between HYPE’s rising open interest and its annualized funding rate is highly revealing. According to data from Laevitas, the funding rate has remained below the neutral 6% threshold. This indicates that the 44% price rally was not driven by overleveraged retail longs. Instead, the combination of rising open interest and low funding rates suggests that short sellers are actively fighting the upward trend, or that core contributors with locked tokens are utilizing perpetual contracts to hedge their exposure.

While the $208 million in ETF inflows represents genuine, non-leveraged capital entering the ecosystem, the protocol’s valuation metrics demand caution. With a circulating supply of 253.41 million against a maximum supply of 953.92 million, HYPE’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) stands at $71.3 billion at a $73.00 token price. To put this in perspective, this valuation matches that of major, highly profitable TradFi financial institutions like Aon Plc.

Hyperliquid currently commands a dominant 53% market share in perpetual trading volumes, far outpacing centralized giants like Binance (14%) and Bybit (9%) in the decentralized space. However, the long-term sustainability of HYPE’s price depends on whether its synthetic TradFi offerings can withstand regulatory scrutiny and whether the protocol can maintain its current fee-generation rate to offset the eventual dilution of the remaining 73% of its token supply.