Excited to see everyone come together for this historic moment. AQAv2 brings the protocol-aligned stablecoin model that @Nativemarkets trail-blazed to USDC with @Coinbase and @Circle's commitment to Hyperliquid. The community no longer has to choose between liquidity and alignment.
Our industry will face adversity as we continue to grow. It gives me hope seeing titans of the industry come together to build for users and bring all of finance onchain.
Is $HYPE consensus?
"HYPE is consensus" assumes the buyer pool is saturated.
I've seen a lot of suggestion on CT that HYPE can't possibly be like $SOL last cycle because everyone owns HYPE and thinks it is going to do well.
Is this actually true though?
Thought it could be interesting to compare the holder base of HYPE right now to SOL in Q1 2023 to see how it stacks up.
The cleanest cut of the data is native stakers on both sides.
HYPE has 48,800 stakers on HyperCore right now (HypurrScan, live). SOL had 557,906 average delegators in Q1 2023 (Messari's State of Solana Q1 2023 report).
That's an 11.4x gap.
And 558k was a bear-market low. SOL's delegator count had fallen from 892k in Q1 2022 through the crypto bear market. Meaning even at Solana's worst, lowest-engagement quarter in its post-launch history, it had 10x more skin-in-the-game participants than HYPE does today.
Total holder base tells the same story directionally, but the data is a bit messier, and more of an extrapolation.
HYPE's full ecosystem holder base, HyperCore spot (232k) plus HyperEVM positions (WHYPE and the LSTs), deduplicated, sits around 260-280K.
SOL's total ≥0.1 SOL wallet count grew to 11.44M by mid 2025 per Glassnode, and reverse-engineering to Q1 2023 puts the base in the low millions, which also roughly matches the number of Phantom MAU users at the time.
Roughly a 6-10x gap in total holders.
SOL ran 1,000%+ over the next two years, and the holder count 6x'd alongside it, from low millions to 11.4M by mid 2025. Holders follow price, not the other way around.
The "consensus" framing assumes the buyer pool is exhausted. Onchain, HYPE is held by a small, highly sophisticated cohort airdrop recipients, DeFi power users, and institutional treasuries.
The standard counter is that Hyperliquid's TAM is narrower than Solana's, a trading venue with an EVM attached, not a general-purpose L1, so holder growth is unlikely to match.
Solana grew massively because it had retail distribution. The question is whether Hyperliquid can replicate that.
The bull argument for HYPE holder growth would be that HIP-3 put the S&P 500, silver, and other TradFi instruments onchain as perps, which is seeing massive adoption. HIP-4 opens prediction markets, which is a category that went mainstream with Polymarket's election cycle and is already a multi-billion dollar behaviour.
And a wave of retail-friendly front-ends is building directly on Hyperliquid's liquidity. Phantom alone has generated $1.6M+ in builder fees routing flow into the venue in under two months, and that's one app.
None of that looked like the TAM two years ago. It does now.
A chain that's becoming the settlement layer for perps, prediction markets, and TradFi assets, with retail distribution handled by wallets and apps people already use, has a holder ceiling that looks a lot more like SOL's imo, although it's not the perfect comparison.
Hyperliquid also has geo-restriction, which permanently suppresses its holder base, that can get unlocked with regulatory clarity or a US-market frontend.
Grayscale filed for a HYPE ETF in March 2026. Institutional onboarding is ongoing and not by any means completed.
260K holders is a long way from any defensible saturation point for an asset capturing that surface area.
i designed the Hyperliquid brand in the early days. Jeff and the team were — are — great collaborators from the start; sharp, open to ideas and humble. the ones who'll talk about the mechanics of global finance and then slide into impressionist painters and plush toys in one call.
i had a feeling they were going to build something big. they did.
and i think the even bigger thing is still ahead.
This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore.
Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how century-old markets work.
Its founder, Jeffrey Yan (@chameleon_jeff), had never taken a physics class when he picked up a textbook at 16. Two years later, he won gold at the International Physics Olympiad. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico—working off a television because he didn't own a monitor.
Within 3 years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms.
Then he shut it down. Yan was rich and free, but he had spent years inside crypto, watching it betray itself. Bitcoin's central premise was decentralization. Yet the biggest exchanges were centralized. Crypto kept reintroducing the dependence on trust it was built to eliminate. He set out to create what should have existed.
Hyperliquid is a blockchain with a trading exchange on top, and anyone can build on it. Yan's vision is to house all of finance. In 3 years, it has done over $4 trillion in volume. And in the past few months, it has begun to outgrow crypto.
Markets for oil, silver, and the S&P 500 now trade on Hyperliquid around the clock, weekends included, and are growing roughly 40% week on week. When the US and Israel bombed Iran on a Saturday in February, Hyperliquid was the venue traders turned to.
Hyperliquid's success has cost Yan his freedom. He works out of a secret office in Singapore and cannot travel without two bodyguards. Even the team's housekeeper doesn't know what they do.
In January, @domcooke spent a week at their office. Read his profile on Yan and @HyperliquidX below.
Thanks @domcooke for spending months on researching and writing this piece. Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." By that measure, Dom has blown me away with how deeply he came to understand Hyperliquid and what we're all building together.
When someone asks what "housing all of finance" means, I'm proud to point them to this piece. I hope readers appreciate just how much Dom and his team put into their work. It reflects the thoughtful craft that is in Hyperliquid's DNA. Special thanks to @patrick_oshag for taking a bet on Hyperliquid's story.
Priority fees just dropped on Hyperliquid testnet.
Important context most people miss: on Hyperliquid, every trader uses the same public API. 1200 requests per minute per IP. No private endpoints. No backdoor feeds. The institutional HFT firm and the retail trader hit the exact same shared infrastructure.
That means the edge today comes purely from engineering: optimizing your API stack, smart batching, parallel workers, predictive pre-fetching.
Whoever pings the API 50ms faster wins. The infrastructure arms race isn't about colocation or private RPCs, it's about who has the best engineers fighting for milliseconds inside the same shared rate limit.
Priority fees change that.
Two priority line:
Gossip priority (read priority & spot balance): you pay HYPE from your spot balance to get your transactions seen first by validators. 5 slots available, refreshed every 3 minutes.
Order priority (write priority & staking balance): you pay a fee in HYPE from your undelegated staking balance to get matched ahead of other orders. Up to 20 bps of notional. Currently for IOC orders on HIP-3.
Real example happening right now:
Trump posts on Truth Social at 8pm ET threatening to bomb Iran's power plants if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed. Oil futures spike 16% in a single session. Crude goes from $94 to $112 in hours. Every trader on Hyperliquid trading oil perps wants to react first.
Without priority fees: whoever has the best API optimization wins. If you ping the API at 51ms instead of 50ms, the position is already gone. No way to pay for an edge. Just engineering.
With priority fees: you bid in HYPE. Whoever wants to be first pays the most. Same shared API, same rate limit, but now there's a financial lever accessible to anyone who holds HYPE. You don't need to be the best engineer anymore. You need to be the one willing to pay.
Same logic for liquidations cascading after the move. Same logic for HIP-4 prediction markets settling on Trump's deadline. Same logic for arbitrage between HL and traditional venues during the chaos.
Why HYPE holders should care:
Every priority fee is paid in HYPE. Every bid creates demand for the token from spot AND staking balances.
As Hyperliquid scales (HIP-3 stocks, HIP-4 predictions, more deployers, more macro events), priority fees become a continuous structural demand sink for HYPE.
This isn't just a feature. It's value capture that scales with network sophistication.
The underlying API is already democratized by design (everyone uses the same one), priority fees are the only legitimate way to pay for a competitive edge on Hyperliquid.
The second tweet talk about the math behind👇
Just use Hyperliquid.
We think that everyone should be able to verify market data on Hyperliquid. That's why we are making complete historical data available, free, forever💧🔮
Including all HIP-3 trades, candles, and all trader positions from launch of each DEX. No paywall.
https://t.co/qG3BBhoPgA