HYPE price hits new highs repeatedly, a panoramic overview of the Hyperliquid ecosystem

Recently, Hyperliquid has become an undeniable presence.

Written by: David C, Bankless Analyst

Compiled by: Golden Finance xiaozou

Recently, Hyperliquid has become an undeniable presence.

HYPE has rebounded nearly 4 times from its historical low, becoming the best-performing asset among the top 100 tokens in the past month—with a growth of over 110%. The ecological data is even more impressive: Hyperliquid now accounts for 70% of the trading volume in DeFi perpetual contracts, with a total trading volume reaching $1.5 trillion, and the ecological TVL has soared to $1.4 billion—growing over 100% just this month.

In this explosive growth, Hyperliquid seems to be on a global tour—trending on Twitter, featured on national television in the United States, and covered in a special report by Bloomberg, becoming the core of policy discussions. In other words, since our report in January of this year (a few weeks before the launch of HyperEVM), the momentum of Hyperliquid's development has significantly accelerated.

To understand the driving forces behind its success, one must first understand the architectural design of Hyperliquid:

HyperCore is the exchange layer, serving as the native perpetual contract DEX that underpins Hyperliquid's reputation, responsible for handling all trading, liquidity, and order book functions.

HyperEVM is a universal EVM smart contract layer launched in February of this year, allowing developers to build DeFi applications that interact deeply with HyperCore's liquidity.

HyperCore can be regarded as the engine, while HyperEVM is the application that utilizes the power of this engine—together they form the Hyperliquid blockchain.

After clarifying the architecture, let's delve into the growth narrative of Hyperliquid.

1. HyperEVM Explosive Growth

Without a doubt, the changes to HyperEVM have been the most significant since January.

Although the initial development was slow, the growth of HyperEVM has exploded in recent weeks—daily on-chain transaction volumes have continuously reached new highs (recently surpassing 300,000 transactions), over $250 million in HYPE has been bridged to the EVM layer, and more than 50 DeFi projects are actively being built here. All of this has been achieved without ecological subsidies or incentive programs, raising the question: why is another universal EVM chain able to attract such immense interest?

2. Explosion of Application Ecosystem

The answer seems to lie in its reliance on the exchange layer. HyperEVM provides developers with two unique application deployment methods:

• Standard Deployment: Fully compatible with other EVM chains. Existing DeFi applications can be directly copied and pasted.
• Native Deployment: Smart contracts can read (and soon support writing) exchange layer data in real-time— including user balances, positions, and real-time prices. Imagine DeFi applications being able to directly access the order books of mainstream exchanges; this is exactly the functionality that this model enables.
• In ecological development, I particularly noticed a protocol that leverages this connectivity advantage - Felix. This DeFi lending protocol comprises two main markets:
• CDP Market: Users can mint decentralized stablecoin feUSD by depositing collateral assets like HYPE. Recently, the Vanilla market was launched—a peer-to-peer lending pool built on Morpho. Unlike minting feUSD, users can directly lend or borrow tokens (including the upcoming HUSD, a stablecoin launched in collaboration between Felix and the m0 Foundation).

CDP and the Vanilla market jointly provide users with flexible borrowing options—whether through the stability of fiat-pegged assets or the leverage effects of decentralized assets—while feeding value back to the EVM layer and exchange layer of Hyperliquid.

Although the DeFi ecosystem of HyperEVM is far from limited to Felix, there are also protocols like Hyperlend, HypurrFi, and Morpho running through Morphobeat, I would like to particularly emphasize three other projects:

HyperUnit (abbreviated as Unit): Unit provides a non-custodial tokenization protocol that enables cross-chain access to assets on Hyperliquid L1. Assets packaged through this protocol can circulate on both the HyperCore exchange (for spot trading) and HyperEVM (for DeFi applications), with uBTC serving as a key collateral asset active in multiple markets such as Felix.

PvP.Trade: Designed in the style of Runescape, PvP.Trade is a Telegram trading bot that turns trading into a multiplayer game. This product was launched in early 2024, allowing users to join teams and engage in spot or contract trading through simple commands like "/long" or "/short". Users can compete against each other, follow their teammates' trades, and vie for rankings on the leaderboard. Its underlying structure connects to Hyperliquid's deep liquidity through Builder Codes, enabling developers to integrate with HyperCore without building from scratch.

Liminal: Liminal is a DeFi yield protocol that operates automated delta neutral strategies while managing both spot and perpetual contract markets. After users deposit USDC, the system automatically handles strategy configuration, position management, and rebalancing. Currently, 16% of the annualized yield comes from charging funding rates to leveraged traders—rather than token incentives or inflation mechanisms. Participation currently requires an invitation code.

3. The Continuous Dominance of HyperCore

Although HyperEVM has made headlines, the development momentum of HyperCore has not diminished in the slightest.

As mentioned earlier, the exchange's various metrics continue to refresh historical peaks. The latest data shows: open contracts reached 10 million USD, 24-hour fee income is 5.6 million USD, and cross-chain deposits amount to 3.5 billion USDC.

In the past six months, Hyperliquid has fiercely competed with leading centralized exchanges in perpetual contract trading volume—an impressive feat for a crypto-native platform without external funding. Its pace of new listings often outstrips that of its competitors, with leveraged markets for popular tokens going live much earlier than on mainstream exchanges.

All these activities drive the rise in HYPE prices through daily fee buybacks. Since December of last year, HyperCore has generated a total of $240 million in fees, with an average of $40 million per month. Through daily buybacks, over 23 million HYPE has been burned, of which approximately 250,000 directly comes from transaction fee burns. Based on the average fees over the past seven days, the auxiliary fund could theoretically buy out the entire circulating supply in 7 years.

4. The popularity continues to rise

As the ecosystem continues to advance, the cohesion of the Hyperliquid community is constantly strengthening.

Users on the X platform are signing tweets with "Hyperliquid" and displaying Hypio NFT avatars. To replace traditional subsidy incentives, grassroots organizations and localized communities such as HypurrCollective and HyperActive Capital have emerged, becoming a friendly entry point for new users into the ecosystem.

These preparations lay the groundwork for the upcoming HIP-3 upgrade - this upgrade will allow anyone to stake HYPE and create permissionless perpetual markets (i.e., tokenized stocks), significantly expanding platform capabilities, advancing the process of complete decentralization, and bringing Hyperliquid closer to its vision of "accommodating all financial activities."

Overall, the success of Hyperliquid should warm the hearts of those weary of endless token incentives and bubble-like VC backers. While many initially came for HYPE mining, the continued usage after the airdrop and the constantly refreshing historical highs together prove that in the end, it is always the inherent excellence of the product itself that prevails.

This growth model driven by actual utility (rather than subsidies) — high-frequency usage, real income generation (current data is extremely impressive), and true community cohesion — is beginning to show results. As the HIP-3 upgrade approaches, high-cohesion communities are actively writing new chapters, and all data indicates that this is just the beginning.