Why am I still long-term bullish on HYPE during a bear market: it’s not just a "coin," but an on-chain financial infrastructure that is consuming transaction traffic.

If I had to summarize my view of HYPE in one sentence, it would be this: in a bear market, narrative is the easiest thing to kill, and cash flow is the hardest. And HYPE is precisely one of the few crypto tokens that has already transitioned from a “narrative asset” to a “cash flow asset.” Right now, the HYPE price is still hovering around $38, and its market cap is roughly in the $9 billion to $9.8 billion range. The price will of course fluctuate, but compared to the price itself, what’s more worth paying attention to is the protocol underneath it has not collapsed—if anything, it keeps strengthening through the bear market.

First, look at the bigger environment. From 2026 to now, it’s not a market that’s suitable for “rising on imagination.” Reuters’ February report said Bitcoin’s decline for the year at that time was 28%, Ethereum was close to 38%, and the entire crypto market had evaporated about $2 trillion from its Oct 2025 high. In other words, the market has switched from a stage where “anything is buyable” to a stage where “people are only willing to pay for things that truly have revenue, users, and barriers.” Against that backdrop, HYPE’s strength is even more convincing, because it isn’t the lucky one in a batch where all coins rise during a tailwind—it’s one of the few assets that can still stand firm when the wind is against it.

And this “standing firm” isn’t just talk—it’s the price and the fundamentals both holding steady. MarketWatch wrote plainly last week that in 2026, HYPE rose by about 60% amid a broader bear market, while Bitcoin and Ethereum fell by about 20% and 28%, respectively. Today, DL News provides even more updated data: HYPE rose 44% in March, Hyperliquid’s weekly trading volume is already $50 billion, and weekly active users are about 100,000. For me, this signal is extremely crucial: the market isn’t pricing a future story that might succeed—it’s repricing an already-running trading engine.

Why is HYPE more resilient in a bear market? The core reason is that it’s not “bull-market beta,” but “trading infrastructure beta.” A lot of altcoins’ rallies rely on fresh capital continuously flowing in, on sentiment spillover, and on everyone wanting to buy spot. But Hyperliquid is different: it feeds on demand for trading, volatility, leverage, hedging, shorting, longing, and asset expansion. As long as the market still has volatility—even volatility in the middle of a decline—perpetual contract platforms can still potentially do very well. In recent weeks, Iran conflict escalated and oil prices surged. MarketWatch mentioned that during this period, Hyperliquid saw a noticeable spike in usage, especially in oil-price-related speculation. That isn’t coincidence; it shows Hyperliquid is absorbing demand for “global 24/7 risk trading.”

More importantly, Hyperliquid isn’t a protocol that only has trading volume without value flowing back. The current page on DefiLlama shows that Hyperliquid Perps’ fees over the past 30 days are about $64.68 million, revenue over the past 30 days is about $58.14 million, revenue over the past 7 days is about $12.32 million, perpetual contract trading volume over the past 30 days is about $200.5 billion, and over the past 7 days is about $45.22 billion. In this set of on-chain numbers, it’s no longer “pretty decent” inside the protocol ecosystem—it’s already top-tier head-of-the-pack. You could interpret many altcoins as “financing stories,” but behind HYPE there is already a very clear revenue engine.

This isn’t the end. What truly makes me bullish on HYPE long term isn’t just that Hyperliquid will make money, but that the way it makes money and HYPE’s value capture have already formed a fairly strong closed loop. Hyperliquid’s official documentation says it very directly: in most protocols, fees mainly benefit the team and insiders; but on Hyperliquid, the fees are “entirely directed to the community,” flowing to HLP, Assistance Fund, and deployers. More importantly, the Assistance Fund will automatically swap trading fees into HYPE, and the HYPE held in the Assistance Fund will be burned, permanently reducing circulating supply and total supply. That means as long as the platform keeps seeing trades, the HYPE buy and burn mechanism keeps operating. This isn’t an abstract “deflationary narrative”—it’s value flowing back that is explicitly written into the protocol’s mechanism at the protocol layer.

If the layer above is “trading business giving HYPE valuation,” then HyperEVM is opening a second layer of value source for HYPE. The official developer documentation states that HyperEVM and HyperCore share the HyperBFT consensus, and HYPE is the native gas for HyperEVM. At the same time, the EIP-1559 base fee will be burned, and even the priority fees on HyperEVM will be burned as well. In other words, HYPE isn’t just a “platform token”—it’s also the underlying fuel when applications expand on this chain. As long as there are more apps, more interactions, and more funds settling on HyperEVM, HYPE’s value logic won’t just be trading-fee value flowing back—it will further stack on-chain usage demand.

Many people underestimate this point: HYPE is essentially betting on two narratives at once—“exchanges” and “public chains.” But the biggest difference between it and a typical public chain is that it has trading flow first, and then applications grow on top of it, instead of drawing an ecosystem pie first and then trying to find users. Hyperliquid’s official documentation is very clear that state execution is split into two parts: HyperCore and HyperEVM. HyperCore has fully on-chain perpetuals and spot order books; all order placements, cancels, matches, and liquidations happen transparently on-chain, and it has one-block finality—currently supporting 200k orders per second. HyperEVM brings the EVM contract environment in, letting developers directly use HyperCore’s liquidity and financial primitives. The essence of this structure isn’t “building another EVM chain,” but connecting high-frequency trading liquidity and programmable financial applications into the same shared state.

That’s why I’ve always felt that Hyperliquid’s competitors aren’t just a few perp DEXs, but something bigger. In traditional crypto, many protocols solve one single point problem: some do order matching, some do AMMs, some do wallets, some do lending, some do EVM. What Hyperliquid wants to solve is putting “trading, liquidity, asset issuance, and the application layer” into a unified system. The official homepage states very explicitly that its goal is a fully onchain open financial system, ultimately “house all of finance.” This line used to sound like a slogan, but recently product moves increasingly look like it’s truly heading down this road.

The best proof of this is that Hyperliquid has already started moving from “trading crypto only” to “trading the world’s volatility.” On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices formally announced that it authorized Trade[XYZ] to launch the first and only officially authorized S&P 500 perpetual contract on Hyperliquid, emphasizing that this is a 24/7 on-chain product based on institutional-grade index data, aimed at eligible non-U.S. investors. The significance of this move is huge: it isn’t merely adding another trading pair—it indicates Hyperliquid is bringing the most core benchmark assets from traditional finance into its own trading network. For HYPE, this means its valuation anchor is no longer only “on-chain perp blue-chip leader,” but begins migrating toward a “global 24/7 risk-asset trading layer.”

And the market is already pricing this direction. DL News reports over the past few days that Hyperliquid weekly trading volume has reached $50 billion and HYPE is up 44% in March; other coverage notes that after the S&P 500 perpetual market on Hyperliquid went live, it quickly reached over $100 million in daily volume and rapidly entered the top ten most active markets on the platform. This shows it’s not just entertaining itself inside crypto-native circles—it’s genuinely starting to find its place in “price discovery under weekends, nights, and geopolitical shocks.” Once traditional markets are closed, the value of on-chain 24/7 markets suddenly becomes very concrete.

So if I were to re-argue “why I’m bullish on HYPE long term,” I’d compress the logic into four sentences:

First, it has real business—not just narrative. In the last 30 days, $200.5 billion of perpetual trading volume and $58.14 million in protocol revenue—this scale is already enough to support its transition from a story asset to a cash flow asset.

Second, it has strong value flow-back, not just user growth. Trading fees are automatically converted into HYPE and then burned, and HyperEVM also makes HYPE a gas asset, with both base fees and priority fees burned. This means as long as the platform continues to be used, the supply-demand relationship for HYPE will keep getting reshaped by the protocol layer.

Third, its business model fits a bear market. Pure spot narrative bleeds the fastest in bear markets, but a trading platform can benefit precisely from volatility, hedging, and cross-asset risk preferences. MarketWatch mentioned that HYPE rose by about 60% even in a broader bear market, while Hyperliquid saw usage spikes during the Iran conflict period due to oil-price speculation—this perfectly confirms the logic of “volatility equals flow, flow equals revenue.”

Fourth, its upside potential hasn’t been fully played out yet. The officially authorized S&P 500 perpetual is just a start. As long as Hyperliquid keeps bringing stock index, commodity, foreign-exchange-style assets, and even more traditional risk exposures onto-chain, HYPE’s ceiling won’t be determined by crypto’s internal bull-and-bear cycles anymore—it will start being tied to the bigger question of whether “global trading continues to move on-chain.”

Of course, after laying out the bull case, the risks still need to be clearly stated. First, Hyperliquid’s official risk documentation explicitly mentions oracle manipulation risk: if the oracle manipulated by the validators is tampered with, the mark price could be affected, which may trigger incorrect liquidations. Second, although the official documentation states that running validation nodes is permissionless, and the top 24 active validators are transparently determined by staking, this still means system security, liveness, and governance evolution remain highly correlated with the validator set structure. Third, the official Terms also state that its interface is not open to Restricted Persons, and MarketWatch also mentions that U.S. users face restrictions; how the regulatory boundaries evolve in the future remains a variable hanging over all on-chain derivatives protocols. Fourth, even if the fundamentals are strong, at this stage HYPE already has a market cap close to $10 billion and an FDV in the hundreds of billions; if trading volume slows down and the cadence of expanding product categories falls below expectations, valuation compression will still come.

But overall, I actually understand better than many people right now why HYPE can stay so tough in a bear market. Because the market isn’t betting on “whether it will succeed” anymore—it’s gradually acknowledging “it has already succeeded in part, and the part that has succeeded is exactly what’s most scarce in a bear market”: real users, real trades, real revenue, real burn-and-destruction, and a trading base layer that’s still expanding into a larger financial market. That’s the fundamental reason I’m bullish on HYPE long term.