Breaking: trade.xyz has absorbed 90% of RWA traffic—has Hyperliquid’s “heart” been squeezed?

Buddy, let’s talk about something swirling under the surface in the space today—something about Hyperliquid and that upstart called trade.xyz that has grown out of it.

Over the past week, the discussion has clearly heated up. The trigger isn’t complicated: the trading volume of RWA perpetual contracts surpassed, for the first time, the volume of crypto-native contracts on Hyperliquid. And trade.xyz essentially dominated the HIP-3 segment. People started asking a sharp question—what would happen if it chose to spin out independently tomorrow?

On July 24, Lorenzo Valente, Crypto Research Director at ARK Invest, posted that in a certain week Hyperliquid’s RWA trading volume share first exceeded crypto assets, reaching 54%. That week, Hyperliquid’s total trading volume was about $50 billion, and RWA trades in HIP-3 alone contributed $26 billion—already exceeding the total of all other DEX crypto perpetual contracts in the same period. Even more noteworthy: since June, single-stock perps have started to outperform indices and commodities, currently accounting for 61% of RWA trading volume. Lorenzo said plainly that he is no longer sure RWA trading will naturally aggregate in the same place as crypto assets; in the category, there may emerge an independent leader.

Two days later, investor @0xCryptoSam直接把问题抛给了市场: If trade.xyz leaves Hyperliquid tomorrow and launches its own exchange, where would traders go to do RWA perps? If trade.xyz issues stock or tokens, how would the valuation logic of $HYPE change? He said he feels confident about the answers to those two questions, but about the “probability of it happening” he is candid—like himself and most large allocators, he isn’t sure. He emphasized this isn’t a put-down of either party—trade.xyz already has increasingly leverage over Hyperliquid. In the related discussion, Cobie responded more directly: Why would they need to leave at all? Theoretically, they could list markets and issue them across multiple venues at the same time.

Behind all these discussions is the leap trade.xyz has made in less than a year. Cumulative trading volume: $408.4 billion; the peak number of daily unique traders exceeded 60k. It isn’t an independent chain, and it doesn’t have its own matching engine. It is the first— and currently the absolute dominant—deployment party of the HIP-3 framework on Hyperliquid. HIP-3 is an upgrade that Hyperliquid rolled out around October 2025, allowing independent teams to deploy perpetual contract markets on Hyperliquid’s infrastructure. trade.xyz is responsible for deciding which assets to list, which oracle to use, setting leverage caps and risk parameters, and continuously operating the market. The actual order matching, clearing, margin calculation, and on-chain settlement are all handled by Hyperliquid’s HyperCore. It enables users to trade perpetual contracts on stocks, indices, commodities, FX, and Pre-IPO assets 24/7 using $USDC as margin. The official documentation states clearly: all markets accessed via trade.xyz run on Hyperliquid. trade.xyz is just one of the interfaces; it is not an exclusive entry point.

From its start as the first deployer when HIP-3 went live in October 2025 to today, trade.xyz has grown the number of markets to nearly 100. The coverage is quite comprehensive: single-stock perps (Tesla, NVIDIA, Google, Micron, SK Hynix, etc.), index-type products (XYZ100, S&P 500, even the STAR market 50 ETF), commodities (crude oil, gold, silver), FX, and a batch of Pre-IPO contracts (SpaceX, CXMT, etc.). On Monday this week, the price of CXMT’s Pre-IPO market almost perfectly tracked the spot’s opening price; the accuracy of the price discovery results even exceeded the team’s own expectations.

On July 27, all the latest data published by trade.xyz officially refreshed their historical highs. Cumulative trading volume reached $408.4 billion, and weekend cumulative trading also broke past $26 billion. The single-day trading peak hit $5.6 billion, open interest stood above $3.9 billion, and the peak daily unique traders exceeded 60k. Early HIP-3 competitors, including Felix Exchange and Ventuals, were shut down in 2026 one after another after trade.xyz completely drained their liquidity. For the entire HIP-3 segment, trade.xyz has long accounted for more than 95% of trading volume and open interest. The vast majority of trades actually take place on Hyperliquid’s front end, not on trade.xyz’s own interface. Under a 50/50 revenue-sharing agreement, the portion Hyperliquid receives is used for $HYPE buybacks. It has also brought a large number of new users to the entire ecosystem—introducing over 300k different wallets in total; monthly net additions have remained stable in the tens of thousands range, with a peak close to 80k. Many traders initially came for stock or commodity perps, but ultimately stayed in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Market depth has also reached a level where institutions can participate seriously. In top index and commodity markets, order-book depth around the mid price reaches the multi-million-dollar range; single-stock names like NVIDIA and Tesla also have sufficient liquidity to support larger positions. Operationally, the team isn’t doing the “deploy and ignore” approach—recent extensive on-chain activity shows that risk parameter adjustments, including position limits, Growth Mode switching, funding rate multipliers, temporary halts, and more, are happening very frequently.

The core of the controversy isn’t whether “it will leave,” but whether “the power structure has already tilted.” The side arguing that it might move sees concentration. When a deployer almost monopolizes the RWA perpetual high-growth track, and that track’s trading volume has already surpassed the crypto-native portion, it naturally holds negotiation leverage. If later it issues its own token and routes fees to its own assets, or secures a higher revenue-share ratio, or even deploys in parallel on other high-performance perpetual chains, it would change the existing allocation of interests. The opposing side looks at structure and incentives. trade.xyz’s most core moat right now—user entry points, the liquidity network, relationships with market makers, and cross-margin composability—are deeply embedded in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Leaving means rebuilding the matching engine, rebuilding depth, and persuading users to migrate positions again; the cost is extremely high and the risk is huge. A partner at Multicoin noted in recent discussions that as long as Hyperliquid still controls the distribution capability, trade.xyz has no motivation to leave. Even more direct signals come from the official side: at the 2026 Hyperliquid Summit, Collins Belton, trade.xyz’s COO legal counsel, explicitly stated there is no reason to leave.

From a business-logic perspective, both sides are highly aligned in the current phase. trade.xyz gets high-performance infrastructure and an existing user pool through HIP-3; Hyperliquid, in turn, uses a professional team to quickly fill the vertical it previously couldn’t directly enter due to regulatory risk—while also gaining revenue sharing and user growth. This is the classic collaboration model of “open infrastructure + vertical experts.” What really needs continued observation isn’t “whether it will move tomorrow,” but several more realistic variables: whether the revenue-share ratio will be renegotiated, whether trade.xyz will issue its own token or equity tools, whether it will deploy markets in parallel on other venues, and whether changes in the regulatory environment will force an architectural adjustment. At present, the probability of fully spinning out independently is low, and the probability of interests gradually diverging is higher.

But as @0xCryptoSam所提醒的 said, trade.xyz has already formed real leverage over Hyperliquid. This leverage itself is the latest example in the crypto industry of a “successful application layer vs. underlying protocol relationship.” trade.xyz doesn’t need to fully leave Hyperliquid—it only needs to deploy the front end and risk-control engine in parallel on derivatives protocols on Monad or Solana. As long as it diverts 20% of the flow, Hyperliquid’s exclusive premium will be broken. That’s the biggest over-the-counter threat trade.xyz poses to Hyperliquid.

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