Grayscale Research Report: HYPE’s 14x P/E Ratio—How Much Upside Remains Relative to Robinhood?
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Grayscale Research Report: HYPE’s 14x P/E Ratio—How Much Upside Remains Relative to Robinhood?
Based on valuation multiples of comparable traditional exchange companies, HYPE’s current P/E ratio of approximately 14x still has room for expansion.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthors: Michael Zhao, Zach Pandl
Translated by: TechFlow
TechFlow Intro: Grayscale Research has released an in-depth report on Hyperliquid. This DeFi project—having raised zero venture capital—generated approximately $800 million in revenue in 2025 and ranks third or fourth globally in perpetual futures open interest. Grayscale believes that, as the U.S. regulatory framework gradually clarifies, Hyperliquid could evolve from a blockchain-based derivatives exchange into a full-service financial platform. For HYPE holders, the most critical signal from this report is that, based on valuation multiples of comparable traditional exchanges, HYPE’s current ~14x P/E ratio still offers room for expansion.
Imagine a startup that, in under three years, broke into an intensely competitive industry. Last year it generated roughly $800 million in revenue, targeting a massive total addressable market. Its team is lean; its operating leverage is exceptionally high. And it achieved all this while remaining inaccessible to users in major markets such as the United States.
This is Hyperliquid.
Caption: Exhibit 1 — Hyperliquid is a breakout player in today’s digital asset industry
At its core, Hyperliquid is a decentralized exchange (DEX) specializing in perpetual futures—a derivative product with no expiration date. Crypto perpetuals are already a large business: industry-wide daily trading volume reached ~$200 billion in 2025. This market has long been dominated by centralized exchanges (CEXs) like Binance, OKX, and Bybit. Hyperliquid is the first decentralized project to meaningfully capture market share in both trading volume and open interest.
Simply expanding further within the perpetuals market would be sufficient to drive significant platform growth. But Hyperliquid’s ambitions extend far beyond that. Although perpetuals remain its primary revenue source, Hyperliquid today functions as a multi-vertical financial services platform.
Caption: Exhibit 2 — Hyperliquid’s diversified financial services footprint
Like other blockchain protocols, Hyperliquid is not a company and does not issue equity. Its token powers the entire network and captures value from transaction activity. HYPE’s circulating market cap stands at ~$13 billion, ranking #8 among crypto assets by market capitalization. Relative to comparable public companies, HYPE’s valuation multiples are modest. Given the platform’s user growth, vast total addressable market, and impending regulatory tailwinds, we believe Hyperliquid retains substantial upside potential.
Caption: Exhibit 3 — HYPE’s market cap trajectory since launch
Perpetual Futures Fundamentals
Although Hyperliquid has broader aspirations, it rose to prominence through decentralized perpetual futures trading—a product born in crypto that Grayscale believes will ultimately permeate traditional finance deeply.
Traditional futures contracts have expiration dates. For example, an oil futures contract specifies delivery of a fixed quantity of oil on a set date. Participants holding positions until expiry must either deliver or receive the underlying asset. Those seeking pure financial exposure must “roll” their positions—i.e., close expiring contracts and open new ones with later maturities—before expiry.
Perpetual futures have no expiration date and never settle via physical or cash delivery. They are designed explicitly to provide hedgers and speculators with pure financial exposure to the underlying asset, typically enabling 24/7 trading.
Traditional futures anchor to spot prices because delivery obligations enforce convergence at expiry. Since perpetuals never expire, what keeps their price aligned? The answer lies in the funding rate mechanism: periodic small payments between long and short positions. When the perpetual price trades above spot, longs pay shorts; when below spot, the flow reverses. The larger the deviation, the higher the funding fee.
Caption: Exhibit 4 — The funding rate mechanism anchors perpetual prices to the underlying asset
Perpetuals are inherently well-suited to crypto markets. Crypto assets trade 24/7; retail and professional speculators exhibit strong demand; and new assets emerge far faster than traditional futures exchanges can list them. Perpetuals offer traders a simple way to express directional views, hedge spot exposure, and use leverage around the clock. They are now one of crypto’s core price discovery venues.
Caption: Exhibit 5 — Global Bitcoin perpetual vs. spot trading volume
Retail investors have many avenues to access leverage: margin accounts with traditional brokers, expiring futures, options, leveraged ETFs. Crypto market experience shows that, when given a choice, retail participants strongly prefer perpetuals—largely due to their simplicity. A similar migration is expected once broader traditional-market participants gain access to perpetuals.
Hyperliquid’s Breakthrough
Hyperliquid achieved a core breakthrough: CEX-grade performance + blockchain transparency and self-custody.
From a trader’s perspective, Hyperliquid feels nearly identical to a CEX: deep order books, rapid execution, and familiar position management interfaces. Yet every Hyperliquid trade—including liquidations—is recorded on-chain, and users retain full self-custody.
Caption: Exhibit 6 — Hyperliquid’s trading experience closely mirrors that of centralized exchanges. Source: app.hyperliquid.xyz screenshot, May 12, 2026
Leveraged trading is the most fiercely contested niche in crypto, with extremely demanding users. Hyperliquid’s success stems from product excellence.
The numbers speak volumes: $2.9 trillion in perpetual futures trading volume in 2025; ~$7 billion in current open interest—ranking Hyperliquid third or fourth globally among perpetual futures exchanges by open interest. Trading volume, open interest, fee revenue, and market attention have all grown in tandem—and the platform has begun expanding beyond purely crypto-native assets.
Caption: Exhibit 7 — Hyperliquid has emerged as the third- or fourth-largest crypto perpetual futures exchange
On fees, Hyperliquid holds a cost advantage over CEXs. Based on 2025 BTC and ETH trading data, CEXs’ weighted average fees were ~15 bps for spot and ~4 bps for futures; Hyperliquid’s were 5 bps and 2 bps, respectively.
Caption: Exhibit 8 — Weighted fee comparison. Note: Estimates based on publicly available maker/taker fees for standard user accounts; excludes tiered fee schedules, discounts, and order book depth effects.
More notably, Hyperliquid has expanded its product suite beyond crypto perpetuals via an open architecture model.
New features are typically introduced through Hyperliquid Improvement Proposals (HIPs), with products deployed by third-party developers—not the Hyperliquid team itself.
HIP-3 enables developers to deploy new perpetual markets—including equities, commodities, and indices—beyond crypto assets. These markets have gained strong traction among users and have begun serving as after-hours price discovery venues for traditional assets. Bloomberg directly uses this framework to describe Hyperliquid’s commodity perpetuals, noting that their crude oil, gold, and silver perpetuals “may foreshadow how these markets respond once mainstream trading resumes.” In another report, Bloomberg described Hyperliquid as “a 24/7 leveraged commodity trading venue.”
Trading volume data validates this positioning. During silver’s surge in February, the HIP-3 silver perpetual reportedly hit >$4 billion in daily volume. At one point on February 5, HIP-3 silver perpetual nominal volume reached ~1% of COMEX silver volume. During Middle East oil volatility, HIP-3 crude oil perpetuals exceeded $4 billion in 24-hour volume on April 9—briefly surpassing Bitcoin perpetual volume. An officially licensed S&P 500 perpetual is now also traded on Hyperliquid via HIP-3, including weekends. Since launch, HIP-3 cumulative volume exceeds $230 billion, with >140 active trading pairs.
Caption: Exhibit 9 — HIP-3 expands Hyperliquid beyond crypto perpetuals into broader asset classes
HIP-4 extends further into outcome markets—binary options akin to prediction markets. These contracts are likewise deployed by third-party developers, yet trading activity still generates fee revenue for Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid’s Technical Architecture
The underlying architecture revolves around two core components:
HyperCore is the trading system, encompassing the order book, clearing engine, perpetuals, spot, margin, and liquidation environments. This is the primary interface traders interact with directly.
HyperEVM is the developer-facing environment, providing an EVM-compatible development interface connected to the Hyperliquid system. The strategic intent is to enable applications to build atop the liquidity, users, and asset base Hyperliquid has already created—not start from scratch on a cold, non-financial network.
HyperBFT is the delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus layer responsible for network security.
The key design choice: Hyperliquid is not an application built atop a general-purpose public chain; rather, it is a purpose-built chain and execution stack optimized for exchange performance—designed to make on-chain trading competitive with centralized infrastructure.
Caption: Exhibit 10 — Hyperliquid’s architecture as a market platform
Five Pillars of Success
Hyperliquid launched publicly in August 2023—before the U.S. Bitcoin ETP listing—and amid a broader DeFi downturn. Its success is not a speculative bubble but stems from solving a concrete problem better than most crypto infrastructure projects: making on-chain trading genuinely viable for high-frequency traders.
Five key factors:
Product Focus. Hyperliquid was built specifically around the perpetuals trading use case—not treating trading as just one of many applications. This allows the product to prioritize what active traders care about most: fast order entry, reliable execution, clear position display, and a familiar exchange interface.
Market Selection. Hyperliquid gained traction by launching markets traders “most wanted to trade right now”—especially long-tail, high-demand assets beyond BTC and ETH.
Platform Flexibility. HIP-3 lets developers directly deploy new perpetual markets, transforming the listing process from a centralized gatekeeping model into an open market creation system.
Distribution Network. Hyperliquid’s builder code and frontend model give third parties economic incentive to route users into the same liquidity pool—not fragment them across isolated venues. The economics are already compelling: Phantom integrated Hyperliquid perpetuals via builder code and earned ~$19.7 million cumulatively in routed trading fees.
Community. Hyperliquid’s token distribution rewards platform users—not VCs or pre-selected insiders. This creates a distinct early holder composition: traders, market participants, and developers who already have intrinsic reasons to follow the project. In a trust-scarce sector, this matters greatly.
None of these advantages alone is decisive—but together they explain why Hyperliquid has become one of the few crypto applications whose success can be measured by real usage—not just vision.
Hyperliquid can reinforce its competitive moat through the interplay of liquidity, distribution, and developer incentives. Higher volume improves liquidity and execution quality, attracting more users and third-party frontends. Builder code and HIP-3 provide external developers with economic motivation to route activity back to the same liquidity pool. This forms a potential network effect—difficult for newcomers to replicate: liquidity attracts distribution, distribution drives more volume, and volume strengthens the protocol’s economic foundation.
HYPE Token
The HYPE token powers the entire Hyperliquid ecosystem.
The project raised no traditional venture capital and airdropped ~30% of its token supply to early users. This determined who cares about HYPE: the initial holder base is heavily skewed toward users who already understand the product—traders, market participants, and community members.
Caption: Exhibit 11 — HYPE’s price trajectory since launch
HYPE’s value derives from transaction fees and functional utility. Hyperliquid Labs confirmed that 99% of fees flow into an Assistance Fund, which converts fees into HYPE and burns the tokens held. Token burning is analogous to share buybacks in traditional equity markets. As burn volume exceeds new issuance, HYPE’s circulating supply has consistently declined.
Caption: Exhibit 12 — HYPE burn, emission, and supply dynamics
HYPE’s ecosystem utilities include:
Staking & Validator Participation: HYPE secures network security via validator staking.
Gas Fees: It serves as the native gas token for HyperEVM; both base and priority fees are burned.
Fee Discounts: Staking HYPE reduces trading fees.
Market Creation Collateral: HIP-3 deployers must maintain 500,000 staked HYPE to operate builder-deployed perpetual markets. This stake serves both as an alignment mechanism and a quality assurance safeguard for markets. HIP-4 outcome markets are live; if permissionless deployment adopts a similar model, it may further deepen HYPE’s role.
HYPE is anchored to a venue with measurable trading activity, fees, and developer demand. The more volume the venue processes, the more critical its fee schedule, staking tiers, builder economics, and Assistance Fund mechanisms become. As HyperEVM, HIP-3, and HIP-4 expand the platform’s boundaries, HYPE’s utility—and potential value accrual—grows accordingly.
Valuation Upside
Hyperliquid is a unique platform offering a suite of financial services, making assessment of its upside challenging. Yet based on reasonable comparables, Grayscale believes both the platform and token hold substantial growth potential.
The chart below compares Hyperliquid’s revenue against a range of trading platforms—including centralized crypto exchanges, traditional spot and derivatives exchanges, and prediction markets. Hyperliquid’s ~$800 million in 2025 revenue is sizable—but represents only ~2% of total crypto perpetuals trading revenue. If Hyperliquid’s non-crypto products achieve sustained adoption, it could tap into the broader derivatives exchange industry’s annual revenue pool of ~$35–40 billion.
Caption: Exhibit 13 — Hyperliquid revenue vs. exchange industry peers
HYPE is not equity—but can be loosely compared to relevant public equities. Based on trailing four quarters through Q1 2026, HYPE’s current valuation multiple is ~14x. Exchange-related public companies show wide variation in multiples, but high-growth firms like Interactive Brokers and Robinhood trade at 35–50x.
Caption: Exhibit 14 — Hyperliquid’s valuation multiple lags equity comparables
U.S. Regulation: Perpetuals Are Coming
Hyperliquid sits at the intersection of two U.S. regulatory gray areas: perpetual futures and decentralized exchanges. Both are rapidly moving toward clearer frameworks.
Perpetuals have historically been unavailable in the U.S. They are not explicitly banned—but do not cleanly fit within the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), the federal statute governing commodities and derivatives, which imposes clear requirements on clearing, margin, and registered trading venues. This ambiguity has triggered enforcement actions against both CEXs and DeFi platforms—and explains why Hyperliquid operates offshore and geo-blocks U.S. users.
But the landscape is shifting rapidly. Recent statements from the CFTC—alongside moves by Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood, and Kalshi—signal regulators are actively pushing to enable perpetual-like products within compliant frameworks. The legal crux is classification: Under the CEA, are perpetuals treated as futures or swaps? How regulators clarify this—via rulemaking, guidance, or no-action relief—will determine timing and durability of market access.
In the near term, regulatory progress may favor registered CEXs first. But medium-term CFTC rulemaking, guidance, or no-action relief could pave a compliant path for Hyperliquid to offer perpetuals in the U.S.—reducing reliance on purely offshore access.
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid’s exchange-like functionality places it squarely in the debate over how DeFi protocols should be regulated. The U.S. currently lacks a dedicated rulebook for DEXs. Regulators apply existing SEC and CFTC frameworks functionally—the core principle being “decentralization ≠ exemption.”
For derivatives-focused DEXs, this means heightened scrutiny and explicit barriers to direct institutional participation—currently occurring mainly via intermediaries or offshore channels. Pending legislation like the CLARITY Act points toward a more structured, role-based digital asset market framework—with clearer distinctions among protocol-layer activity, frontend operators, intermediaries, and registered trading venues.
This distinction is critical for Hyperliquid: As a non-custodial infrastructure provider, its core protocol may ultimately receive different regulatory treatment than the interfaces or entities facilitating user access. These proposals do not yet create a fully viable regime for on-chain perpetuals—but they represent a pathway toward that goal—especially if paired with targeted safe harbor provisions, clearer broker definitions, and rules tailored to on-chain market structures (e.g., margin, funding rates, 24/7 trading). Regulatory direction is toward enabling innovation within guardrails—and Hyperliquid’s positioning—open, global, non-custodial—aligns with policy discussions centered on preserving permissionless access while introducing appropriate market safeguards.
Risks
HYPE investors should be aware of conventional risks plus several platform-specific risks:
HYPE’s annualized price volatility is ~80%, ~40 percentage points higher than Bitcoin. Hyperliquid’s validator set is more concentrated than other blockchain networks, and it runs on closed-source software. Hyperliquid’s growth potential depends partly on evolving U.S. financial services regulation—if regulatory headwinds persist, the platform may remain limited to other jurisdictions, capping growth.
Conclusion
Hyperliquid has no direct analog in either crypto or traditional finance. It presents a compelling vision for blockchain-based finance: an open-architecture platform powered by permissionless innovation, upholding DeFi principles of transparency and self-custody—while being built around an optimized core application proven successful by real user metrics. If it sustains execution discipline, retains and grows its community, and benefits from regulatory evolution, Grayscale believes Hyperliquid has the potential to become a financial services powerhouse.
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