Hyperliquid spent the second quarter of 2026 pulling away from the rest of the crypto market, according to a new quarterly report published by research firms Four Pillars and GLC Research with support from several Hyperliquid-ecosystem groups.
The report—an ecosystem-aligned document whose figures it says trace to public sources including hl.eco, ASXN, the Hyperliquid API, and DeFiLlama—frames Q2 as the quarter the market began treating HYPE less as high-beta crypto exposure and more as a claim on a cash-generative protocol.
The Decoupling
The headline is the divergence. Per the report, HYPE returned 79.2% in Q2 and printed an all-time high of $76.90 on June 16, closing the quarter at $66.04. Over the same period, Bitcoin fell 14.1% in its third consecutive negative quarter and has roughly halved from its October 2025 peak.
That gap—a 93.3-percentage-point outperformance—followed a 66.9-point gap in Q1, and the report argues that two consecutive quarters of that magnitude are difficult to attribute to market beta or positioning. Its interpretation is that investors have started to underwrite Hyperliquid on fundamentals rather than correlation.
Those fundamentals were mixed on the surface. Protocol revenue came in at $169.37 million, down 6.6% quarter-over-quarter and 11.8% year-over-year, while holder revenue fell 4.7% to $142.88 million.
But the report characterizes the softness as deliberate “Growth Mode” pricing rather than weakening demand, noting that April was the weakest month of the modern fee regime and that June finished 52% above the April trough—a run rate that annualizes to roughly $840 million. Cumulative holder revenue crossed $1 billion at quarter-end, nineteen months into the platform’s fee-to-buyback record. Buybacks themselves totaled $140.66 million for the quarter, repurchasing 2.77 million HYPE.
The USDC Realignment
The report calls the quarter’s defining decision a stablecoin realignment. In May, Hyperliquid sunset USDH, its own native stablecoin, and designated Coinbase-deployed USDC as its aligned quote asset, with validators ratifying the change on June 12. Under the arrangement, roughly 90% of the reserve yield on platform USDC will flow to the Assistance Fund—the mechanism that buys back HYPE—with accrual beginning in late August and a first payment due in early October.
The report estimates that deal is worth $135–200 million annualized at prevailing rates, describing it as the largest single addition to holder economics since builder codes. It also frames the cost bluntly: Hyperliquid gave up its own stablecoin and wound down the issuer that pioneered the model and forced a decision point for every project that had been quoting in USDH. Stablecoin float on HyperEVM quadrupled to $5.58 billion during the quarter as the migration played out. This is the other side of a deal Circle referenced on its own recent earnings call, where the issuer disclosed the Hyperliquid revenue share and noted that most of that USDC sat on Coinbase’s platform.
Permissionless Markets, One Operator
The quarter’s most striking structural story is a paradox. HIP-3, which lets anyone deploy a market by staking, set volume records—deployer volume grew 59.6% to $213 billion, roughly a third of all matched volume, and HIP-3 open interest ended the quarter 47% higher. This is the machinery behind headline-grabbing moments the report opens with: a private rocket company priced on Hyperliquid on a Saturday when the New York Stock Exchange was closed, and a Chinese chipmaker priced at a premium to its yet-to-open Shanghai listing.
Yet beneath the record aggregates, the deployer layer collapsed to a single operator. The report says one deployer, Trade[XYZ], saw its volume share rise from 85% in March to 97% in June and effectively 100% by July, as rivals exited or migrated. A system built to be permissionless, in other words, consolidated to near-monopoly in practice within a quarter—a tension the report flags rather than papers over.
Wall Street Arrives, and Fights Back
Q2 was also when institutions showed up on both sides. Three US spot HYPE ETFs launched within eight weeks—21Shares, Bitwise, and Grayscale products—drawing $308.7 million in cumulative net inflows by quarter-end, per the report. HIP-4 outcome markets went live on mainnet, producing $211 million in volume and 13,046 new traders in an early, deliberately low-fee phase.
The incumbent response was litigation. The report notes that after the CFTC moved to accommodate onshore perpetuals and approved the first US-regulated bitcoin perpetual, CME sued its own regulator on June 18. The catch, the report stresses, is that US market participants remain walled off: everything it measured happened without US access, which it calls the binding constraint on Hyperliquid’s addressable market.
What to Watch — and How to Read It
The report is candid about counter-currents: HyperEVM TVL fell 14.8% even as stablecoin float quadrupled, and the team’s token claim rate declined for a third straight quarter, with cumulative unclaimed vested tokens reaching 64.9 million (roughly $4.3 billion at quarter-end prices). Foundation-delegated stake fell below half of the total stake for the first time as the validator set expanded to 27.
One caveat frames all of it. This is a report produced by research firms with ecosystem backing—its foreword features quotes from executives at Hyperliquid-aligned companies—so its numbers, superlatives, and interpretations are the authors’ own. To its credit, the report discloses its methods and sources and repeatedly flags where it is estimating. As always, the underlying figures are worth cross-checking against independent data before drawing conclusions.
Also Read: Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 Tops $4B in Open Interest for First Time
