Yes, USDC becoming the main quote asset is extremely bullish for Hyperliquid. This announcement brings $160M additional buyback pressure for $HYPE.

But let’s be honest, there are still a lot of uncomfortable questions around how the whole $USDH story played out.
The original thesis behind USDH was to build a Hyperliquid-native stablecoin capable of capturing the yield generated by idle USDC and redirecting that value back to the ecosystem.
Now, less than a year later, Coinbase and Circle are effectively taking over after Native Markets failed to make USDH a real alternative to USDC.
The questionable part is that Native Markets originally secured USDH issuance rights by pushing the “Hyperliquid-aligned” narrative extremely hard, while also benefiting from very strong ecosystem connections.
At the time, we already argued that the team did not appear to have the operational capabilities required to run a stablecoin at this scale.
The result speaks for itself: $USDH barely crossed $100M in supply while USDC remained overwhelmingly dominant across Hyperliquid.
Now Native Markets is selling the USDH-related rights to Coinbase as if this were a regular private asset even though most of the project’s value came directly from the mandate and legitimacy granted by the Hyperliquid community.
Meanwhile, a large number of HyperEVM teams spent meaningful resources, accepted worse liquidity, lower usage and degraded UX just to integrate USDH and stay “aligned” with the ecosystem.
Another question remains unanswered: what happened to the 50% of USDH revenues that were supposed to fund adoption and ecosystem growth? How will those funds now be used if USDH is effectively sunset?
To be clear, the final economic outcome for Hyperliquid is objectively excellent. Hyperliquid basically managed to force Circle and Coinbase into sharing 90% of USDC reserve revenues with the protocol and will now be getting 90% of revenue from a $5B asset instead of 50% from a $100M asset.
But it’s hard not to feel like this entire ending was somewhat predictable from day one.