Hyperliquid’s RWA perps boom is eating into the revenue that backs HYPE

Hyperliquid has never traded more contracts, and it has never kept a smaller share of the money those contracts earn

Open interest, the total value of leveraged positions traders hold at one time, climbed to just above $11 billion on July 13, the platform's highest in 2026. Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures volume over the past 30 days ran to nearly $178 billion. Hyperliquid now settles roughly 9% of all open perp positions worldwide, centralized exchanges included, up from under 7% in late May.

But the platform’s revenue has gone the other way. Gross protocol revenue peaked at roughly $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 and has fallen every quarter since, to nearly $295 million, then roughly $217 million, then about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026, DefiLlama data shows. That is a 43% drop from the top, booked while the trade count climbed.

Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal (HIP-3) helps explain why Hyperliquid is keeping less of the activity it attracts. Since October 2025, anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, can deploy their own perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid's order books and keep up to half the trading fees.

At the start of 2026 these builder-deployed markets were about 2% of Hyperliquid's perp volume. They are now roughly half of it.

The pass-through shows up in the accounts. Cost of revenue, the portion of fees Hyperliquid hands straight back to builders, market makers and its own liquidity vault, was under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025. A year later it was 18%.

Builder code fees, which front-ends like Phantom charge on top for routing an order, arrived at roughly $16 million of revenue in the second quarter and left as roughly $16 million of cost in the same quarter. Every dollar of it passes through.

Traders keep showing up because of what those builder markets list. Real-world asset perps, contracts on things like crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker and pre-IPO names like SpaceX, hit a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month and overtook bitcoin as the platform's largest market by that measure.

Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities did $25 billion in volume, 52% of the weekly total, outpacing crypto perps for the first time. The contracts settle in stablecoins, never expire, and trade through the weekend when the New York Stock Exchange is shut. A product such as leveraged Nvidia exposure, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, has few other homes.

That growth sits largely on one set of shoulders. Trade.xyz accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest, which means Hyperliquid's record numbers depend on a single deployer's oracle choices, margin settings and risk management.

The risk in that arrangement showed earlier this week on Monday, when a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue dropped Trade.xyz's SK Hynix contract 19% and triggered liquidations the firm has since agreed to reimburse.

Hyperliquid routes about 97% of trading fees into its Assistance Fund, which buys the token on the open market and retires it, taking roughly 44.5 million HYPE out of the total supply so far. The buyback is a fixed share of earnings, so it contracts when earnings contract. The fund bought nearly $290 million of HYPE in the third quarter of 2025. In the second quarter of 2026 it bought roughly $149 million, close to half as much.