Hyperdash Co-founder’s Conversation: Why is Hyperliquid still significantly undervalued?

Source: 《The Rollup》

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Hyperdash, a trading data analytics platform based on Hyperliquid, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Hanson Birringer recently appeared on The Rollup podcast, where he detailed how Hyperliquid builds an efficient and decentralized liquidity layer by combining three major trends: perpetual futures, RWA, and stablecoins. The interview also mentioned related ETF products launched by Grayscale, and said this provides a compliant entry route for institutional investors into this ecosystem; he further expressed strong optimism about the protocol’s value-capture mechanism enabled through token buybacks.

PANews compiled the highlights of the interview.

Host: How has this month been?

Hanson: It’s been an absolutely great month. We released a ton of announcements. For example, I officially joined HyperDEX full-time, and announced the acquisition of Imperator—so we’re now launching the full data and node infrastructure validator business. I’m really looking forward to the Hyperliquid Summit later this week. In short, building in the Hyperliquid ecosystem is an exciting time right now.

Host: I think over the past few years, as products have evolved and as tokenization and trading have advanced, the investment logic surrounding Hyperliquid has changed a lot. Maybe you can share what your current investment logic for Hyperliquid is. When you raise funds for the Grayscale ETF’s SPV and talk with high-net-worth individuals and institutional allocators, what logic truly resonates with them?

Hanson: This is one of my favorite topics. We can talk about why Hyperliquid is important not only to the crypto capital markets, but also to the broader traditional financial markets that are evolving alongside it. I think, at the end of the day, there are multiple core reasons why investors, researchers, traders, and market participants are so excited about what Hyperliquid is building and want to be part of it. First, it’s open-source, permissionless, and decentralized. It has the same rules for every participant on the platform. Also, it not only embraces the spirit of crypto, but combines it with high-performance financial systems and applications—something that can truly bring institutional capital into this decentralized world, which we hadn’t really seen before. In my decade-long career in crypto, it’s been the only project that made these two worlds develop together rather than in parallel.

Host: How do you view Hyperliquid as an expression of the bullish trends for perpetual contracts, tokenization, and stablecoins? How do you see the combination of these three—super trends destined to grow exponentially, spanning a decade? Is Hyperliquid a good vessel to express all three?

Hanson: Absolutely—it’s the purest embodiment of these trends. For perpetual contracts, the answer is obvious: Hypercore is the leading perpetual DEX, and it’s competing with centralized exchanges. Judging by market share in open interest (OI) and trading volume, or from a liquidity perspective, it’s already among the top—if not number one—in certain trading pairs. In terms of launching new asset types, it’s also a category leader. We’ve seen the launch of HIP-3 introduce RWA perpetual contracts. So you’re effectively combining these larger trends into a really great product.

And for commodity and stock perpetual contracts, today Hyperliquid is the de facto category leader among crypto exchanges. What they’re doing is truly open-sourcing the builder layer rather than outsourcing it. That’s at the core of the Hyperliquid spirit: bringing in other high-quality, capable builders and getting them to add value to the ecosystem.

As for stablecoins, USDC is now becoming the core quoted asset, and I don’t think the market has really appreciated how significant this move is. Because since stablecoins were created, they’ve never done trades like this. They voluntarily give up 90% of revenue just to become part of the Hyperliquid narrative. I think that’s something people really need to digest and understand, and it’s important both from a narrative perspective and from a revenue perspective. Considering exchange trading volume and what’s happening, Hyperliquid, HyperEVM, and Hypercore combined have roughly around $10 billion in stablecoin supply. Out of this $10 billion, assuming it earns a 4% net interest spread in back-end U.S. Treasury bonds, 90% of the收益 will go into the endowment fund, and the fund will use that to programmatically buy back Hype tokens on-chain. Besides trading fees, this adds purchase pressure in the multi-hundred-million-dollar range for the protocol.

So, to summarize your question, Hype as a token and as an ecosystem is really the purest expression of the three major crypto supertrends: perpetual contracts, RWA, and stablecoins—and over time, they’ll compound together.

Host: Jeff once mentioned that Hyperliquid is like AWS for the liquidity space—liquidity breeds more liquidity. But there’s a headwind right now: heavily regulated consumer front-ends like Robinhood and Kalshi find it hard to directly plug into this system. How do you see this regulatory tailwind?

Hanson: This is a global challenge, but Hyperliquid is actively addressing it. Hyperliquid’s policy center, together with the wallet service provider Phantom, is actively lobbying U.S. regulators (such as the CFTC) to secure a clear regulatory position for decentralized trading venues. Once that’s achieved, traditional regulated broker front-ends can route orders directly to Hyperliquid’s back-end for execution. Also, what traditional brokerages disrupted the industry with “zero commissions” back then—now Hyperliquid is providing highly competitive low-cost underlying liquidity, which is a huge market.

Host: Recently, the open interest (OI) for HLP 3 (the RWA market) hit an all-time high. With stablecoin yield and Priority fees, how do you expect Hyperliquid’s revenue growth story to play out over the next one to two years?

Hanson: Traditional financial markets are extremely large—some options and ETF notional volumes are measured in trillions, even ten thousands of trillions. If RWA perpetual contracts can capture even a small portion of global trading volume, Hyperliquid’s revenue could grow 100x over the next decade. As trading volume grows, the size of the margin held on the protocol will also skyrocket, which will further amplify stablecoin yield and the scale of token buybacks.

Host: You founded Hyper Holdings and helped push the rollout of the Grayscale Hyperliquid ETF. What were the considerations behind that?

Hanson: Hyper Holdings Global is a special purpose vehicle (SPV). We set up the SPV and provided seed funding to Grayscale’s ETF in the form of the underlying assets. Traditional institutional investors typically don’t have Coinbase accounts and face strict risk-control and compliance frictions. The ETF gives them a one-click investment route, and our funding support ensures the product’s initial assets under management (AUM) and liquidity, so large capital can move in and out with confidence. Institutional investors really value Hyperliquid’s clear business model of “cash flow + token buybacks,” which is much easier to explain than valuing other chains.

Host: HyperDash currently processes more than $35 billion in trading volume. You recently acquired Imperator, an institutional-grade data company. What value does this bring to the platform?

Hanson: HyperDash is essentially a global brokerage and trading data terminal, offering more advanced tools than official front-ends. After acquiring Imperator, we become Hyperliquid’s active validator nodes, allowing us to process on-chain data at the fastest speed. This not only improves retail traders’ experience, but also lets us provide enterprise-grade data packages to traditional asset management firms, helping them with investment underwriting and decision evaluation.

Host: For Hyperliquid, what are your bullish and bearish outlooks? It doesn’t necessarily have to be about price—from your perspective, what must go right in the next 18 months for Hyper Dash, Hyper Holdings, and the entire Hyperliquid ecosystem to achieve the most optimistic outcome? And what would medium or bearish conditions look like?

Hanson: The logic behind the bullish case is very clear: connecting stablecoin and local fiat on-ramps means that people around the world who were previously excluded from the dollar capital markets can now access global liquidity just by tapping a few times on a phone—something never seen in human history before. As for the bearish logic, I find it hard to identify one. Unless the long-term trend of global internet adoption and financial inclusion reverses, we have every reason to stay extremely optimistic.

Further reading: After Hyperliquid supports half of the empire, Trade.XYZ’s token launch speculation makes the community panic…