Morning Minute: HYPE Soars to ATH as SPCX Takes Off

GM!

Today’s top news:

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token hit a new all-time high of $76.50 overnight, up 12% on the day.

The driver seems to be SpaceX. With Nasdaq closed, the after-hours price discovery for the year’s biggest IPO has been running on Hyperliquid’s 24/7 SPCX perp, which did about $1.1 billion in volume and climbed roughly 23% to around $209 (soaring as high as $230 last night). That made the tokenized SpaceX contract the third-biggest market on the entire platform, behind only Bitcoin and Ether, and ahead of Solana and even HYPE’s own book.

HYPE’s demand isn’t only onchain. HYPE ETFs traded roughly $17 million, their second-biggest day on record, a sign TradFi is reaching for exposure too. As pre-IPO and real-world-asset perps pull activity onchain, Hyperliquid is the venue scooping it up, and HYPE is the cleanest way to own that flow. And the market is realizing it and re-rating HYPE in real time…

This is the 2nd week in a notable shift in execution. The reserve is the pile Saylor set aside to cover dividends on Strategy’s preferred shares and interest on its debt (~$1.7B coming due over the next 12 months), and he is rebuilding it after the company unexpectedly used $900M to pay off 2029 convertible debt last month. JPMorgan flagged that the reserve covered only about six months of dividends and said Strategy needed to restore it to reassure investors. So Saylor is now doing both at once, stacking Bitcoin and stacking dollars, and he’s doing it by selling MSTR shares with his ATM program. And MSTR shareholders don’t seem to mind, with the stock up 6% on Monday.

That ends the OpenAI and Anthropic perps it ran, which let traders bet on the valuations of the two biggest private AI companies. The contracts have been halted and settled on Hyperliquid.

Now, Ventuals is consolidating into another team and not just giving up, so perhaps there is a future here. Or perhaps TradeXYZ (the marketshare leader for RWA perps on Hyperliquid) will stand these markets up. If not, this may be a real dent in Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO pitch.

But with SPCX doing billions in volume and catching national (even global) attention on Hyperliquid, imagine they’ll find a solution to stand these pre-IPO markets back up in short order.

Spot volumes took the hardest hit, sliding to $963 billion, the weakest month since October 2023. The downtrend tracks the broader crypto drawdown and the reality that AI stocks have been eating crypto’s attention. But there are other factors at play.

Real-world asset perpetuals, the contracts tied to tokenized stocks and private companies (i.e. SpaceX pre-IPO), jumped 10.4% to a record $211 billion, and DEX futures rose for the first time in seven months. So even as traders abandoned spot, RWA perps and DEX volume went up. Capital is still here, it’s just trading differently than it did.

As for the crypto impact, there are several. For one, interest in RWAs and stocks takes away from crypto token interest. We see that clearly in the price action and volumes. The good news is, with that capital onchain, it’s an easy rotation if and when the crypto trade heats back up. Another big impact factor is the exodus from spot trading to perps and what that means for how tokens trade. It was evident in the ZEC exploit and 60% crash just 2 weeks ago. When ZEC went down, so did several other recent alt movers that were not directly correlated. But they were correlated in that they were being longed on Hyperliquid by a cohort of traders who had just lost capital on the ZEC trade, and thus those traders had to do more broad derisking. This means we very well may see more group moves up and down in “hot alts” and other consensus trades. There are several other impacts as well, likely to play out over time. Certainly a situation worth monitoring…