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.