Hyperliquid Open Interest Hits New Yearly High, But Protocol Revenue Set to Decline for Fourth Consecutive Quarter

August 10th, Hyperliquid trading activity continues to grow, but protocol revenue has been consistently declining. On July 13th, its open interest in futures contracts rose to just over $110 billion, hitting a new high for 2026; in the past 30 days, perpetual contract trading volume has approached $1.78 trillion, currently accounting for about 9% of the global perpetual contract open interest. Meanwhile, DefiLlama data shows that its total protocol revenue, after peaking at around $357 million in the third quarter of 2025, has been decreasing continuously, falling to about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026, a 43% drop from its peak.

The revenue decline is related to the HIP-3 market expansion. Since October 2025, developers staking 500,000 HYPE tokens have been able to deploy their own perpetual contract markets on the Hyperliquid order book and retain up to 50% of trading fees. At the beginning of this year, such markets accounted for only about 2% of the platform's perpetual contract trading volume, but it has now risen to about half. During the same period, the share of Hyperliquid's revenue cost in total revenue has increased from less than 6% in the second quarter of 2025 to 18% a year later.

The fastest-growing sector is RWA perpetual contracts. Contracts related to unlisted companies such as crude oil, gold, NVIDIA, Tesla, the Nasdaq 100 Index, and SpaceX reached a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month, surpassing Bitcoin to become the platform's largest market. From July 13th to 19th, trading volume of tokenized stocks and commodities reached $25 billion, accounting for 52% of the total weekly volume, exceeding crypto perpetual contracts for the first time. However, Trade.xyz accounts for over 90% of all HIP-3 open interest, making the platform's increased trading activity highly dependent on a single deploying party.

Approximately 97% of Hyperliquid's trading fees go into the Assistance Fund, used to buy and burn HYPE on the open market, reducing the total supply by approximately 44.5 million tokens. However, with the declining revenue, the buyback amount has decreased from nearly $290 million in the third quarter of 2025 to about $149 million in the second quarter of 2026. Meanwhile, on August 6th, nearly 10 million HYPE tokens were unlocked for core contributors, valued at around $550 million at the time, and similar monthly unlocks will continue until 2027. If the revenue growth of about $45 million in the first four weeks of the third quarter continues, the total revenue for this quarter will be approximately $150 million, possibly marking a consecutive fourth quarter of decline.