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Behind the All-Time High of HYPE, These Four Bullish Factors Are Coming Together

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HYPE is no longer simply seen as a high-performance perpetual DEX token, but as an on-chain transaction system.

Original Article Title: "The Surge Behind the HYPE: These Four Bullish Factors Are Quietly Unleashing"

On May 21, the price of HYPE surged above $56, hitting a new high since September 2025, with a more than 20% increase in 24 hours and a market cap exceeding $14.3 billion. Latest data from ASXN shows a total user count of 1.2 million and a total trading volume of $4.33 trillion. (Footnote: On the evening of the 21st, HYPE surged above $60, reaching a new all-time high)

Amid the volatility of mainstream assets like Bitcoin, what is the reason behind HYPE's strong independent performance? Perhaps it is no longer simply market beta-driven, but rather the result of the protocol's transformation from a high-performance Perp DEX to a "Layer-One Financial Superterminal" – a series of positive feedback loops involving trading volume, fee revenue, buyback mechanisms, product iterations, and institutional compliance channels are reshaping HYPE's valuation framework.

HYPE is no longer merely seen as a high-performance perpetual DEX token, but is reevaluated as an on-chain trading system capable of capturing the entire asset class of crypto, commodities, RWAs, and even prediction markets.

From HIP-3 to HIP-4 Prediction Markets

Following Hyperliquid's late 2024 TGE and a large-scale airdrop, HYPE had an initial price of around $3.81. On September 18, 2025, HYPE hit an all-time high of $59.46, then the price dropped to around $20 with the overall market correction. However, the true foundation of HYPE's independent performance can be traced back to the HIP-3 upgrade in October 2025.

This proposal allowed any user staking 500,000 HYPE to deploy permissionless perpetual contract markets, expanding the platform from pure crypto perpetuals to commodities, stock indices, RWAs, and even pre-IPO assets. Within a few months, the HIP-3 markets absorbed over $10 billion in open interest, $250 billion in trading volume, and $300 million in fees; commodities such as silver and oil saw daily trading peaks surpassing $1 billion. In May 2026, RWA perpetual OI repeatedly hit new highs, with non-standard assets like S&P 500 and SpaceX futures becoming new growth drivers; RWA assets once occupied 23 out of the top 30 trading pairs on the platform.

HIP-4 further raised the admission threshold: the prediction market deployment now requires staking 1 million HYPE (increased from 500,000 in HIP-3). Staked seats support rolling and periodic markets, are reusable after settlement, and are subject to slashing penalties (for oracle manipulation, abnormal market conditions, or prolonged downtime). This design has increased the HYPE staking requirement, and also incorporates prediction market fees into the protocol buyback logic, forming a closed loop of "Product Expansion - More Participants - Higher Fees - Stronger Buyback."

TradFi Assets 24/7 On-Chain Trading

The underlying strength of Hyperliquid lies in its HyperBFT consensus: 200,000 orders per second, 0.07-second block confirmation, and a fully on-chain order book. This allows the platform to seamlessly capture global macro events—weekends, US stock market closing hours, surges in gold and silver, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East driving oil prices up—enabling traders to hedge in real-time.

Since the end of 2025, the commodity trading frenzy, led by gold and silver, has directly boosted HYPE: silver perpetual contracts have seen daily trading volumes exceeding $1 billion, driving overall liquidity.

More importantly, RWA transactions are liberating the platform from "crypto echo chambers": RWA Open Interest has reached a record high of $2.6 billion, doubling from two months ago. This growth directly decouples the valuation of HYPE from the pure crypto cycle, instead linking it to the global demand for real asset trading.

Compared to CEX, Hyperliquid's transparent, permissionless nature allows institutions and retail traders to trade RWA assets on the same ledger, making it a "safe haven in the bear market of 2026."

Buyback +USDC Yield +ETF

The most hardcore driver of HYPE's price surge is its unique "Buyback Flywheel." The protocol explicitly states that 97% (sometimes as high as 99%) of the transaction fees flow into the Assistance Fund, which continuously buys and burns or holds HYPE on the open market.

By mid-May 2026, the fund had repurchased over $1 billion worth of HYPE accumulated. The annual buyback scale in 2025 exceeded $645 million (making up 46% of the industry's total buyback amount), with the current holdings equivalent to a market value exceeding $2 billion. The early average purchase price was around $14, resulting in significant paper profits. Data from May 17-18 shows that the fund's daily purchases reached 38,000 HYPE.

According to The Block data, from May 17 onwards, Hyperliquid's transaction fee income surpassed $10 million, capturing a 42.2% market share, leading all public chains.

The USDC Treasury deployment on May 16 added a new layer with Coinbase as the capital deployment partner and Circle providing the CCTP infrastructure. After both parties pledged HYPE to activate AQAv2, it is expected that 90% of the USDC reserve yield (assuming a $4.7 billion scale and 3.8% annual yield) will belong to the protocol, generating approximately $160 million in annual revenue, with a daily repurchase potential of $440,000.

This mechanism means that HYPE buybacks are no longer solely dependent on trading volume but have added a programmatic buyback demand chain of "stablecoin deposit attraction → reserve yield → protocol revenue sharing," greatly enhancing the stability and predictability of the flywheel.

The ETF channel has opened the door to compliant capital. In May, the 21Shares THYP and Bitwise BHYP ETF products were launched. Furthermore, Bitwise has explicitly committed to using 10% of the BHYP management fee to buy and pledge HYPE — this is equivalent to locking in a long-term buyback channel for the protocol that automatically scales with the ETF's size growth, transforming HYPE from a purely crypto asset to an asset priced in TradFi terms.

As of May 21, hypurrscan data shows that the Assistance Fund has become the largest industry buyback force, with cumulative buybacks of over $2.49 billion HYPE since 2025.

a16z Becomes the Sixth-Largest HYPE Holder with an Average Price of $38.7

On-chain AI tracking shows that as of May 20, the a16z-affiliated wallet has accumulated 2.11 million HYPE (worth approximately $90.87 million) since April 14, 2026, becoming the sixth-largest holder, with most of it in a staked state.

Its associated addresses:

· Accumulated 206,000 HYPE tokens ($9.95 million) in the past 11 hours;

· Accumulated 2.35 million HYPE tokens ($102 million) since April 16.

· Since 2026, accumulated 4.92 million HYPE tokens ($183 million);

· Started large-scale accumulation in August 2025, accumulated a total of 9.18 million HYPE tokens ($356 million), with an average entry price of $38.77.

In April of this year, Arthur Hayes publicly stated that "HYPE is expected to reach $150 by August," with the core logic being the exponential expansion of DEX derivative trading volume and buyback scale.

On the regulatory front, the SEC is brewing a "Innovation Exemption" framework, allowing tokenized stocks to trade without the need for a full broker/exchange platform registration in specific scenarios. This potential benefit will further open up Hyperliquid's imaginative space in areas such as stock tokenization and Pre-IPO.