Author: Thejaswini M A
Compiled and organized by BitpushNews
Bitpush Note:
On May 22, 2026, the China Securities Regulatory Commission delivered a major blow: it proposed severe penalties against institutions such as Tiger Brokers, Futu Securities, and Longqiao Securities for illegal cross-border business activities. These entities face substantial fines, and all illicit gains by related domestic and overseas parties will be legally confiscated. Within a two-year intensive rectification period, all domestic operations will be fully shut down, and existing mainland clients will be permitted to sell their holdings only. Upon the announcement, the affected U.S.-listed brokerage stocks plunged more than 40% in pre-market trading.
When compliant cross-border channels are gradually shut down, where will the capital—still eager to allocate global assets, participate in pre-IPO pricing of companies like SpaceX, and trade any asset anytime, anywhere—flow?
The answer seems to be emerging clearly: toward RWA, toward Hyperliquid.
This is not a prediction. This is what is happening right now.
On the same day the fine notice was announced, HYPE reached a new high.
Coincidence? Maybe. But capital never believes in coincidence. It only believes in exits.
The following is the main text:
CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) is the world's largest derivatives exchange, where professional traders buy and sell futures contracts for crude oil, gold, interest rates, stock indices, and Bitcoin. It processes trillions of dollars in trading volume daily and has been operating since 1898.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) owns the New York Stock Exchange and operates multiple derivatives exchanges worldwide, making it another industry giant.
They are the most powerful financial market infrastructure companies on Earth. When they point to something and call it “extremely dangerous,” regulators find it hard not to listen.
Currently, CME and ICE are pressuring the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Congress to crack down hard on Hyperliquid, warning that this “KYC-free” platform is a breeding ground for market manipulation and sanctions evasion.
- There is indeed a zero-KYC situation here. Although Hyperliquid uses filters on its main website frontend to block addresses sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), its underlying protocol is completely permissionless. If someone bypasses the website and interacts directly with the smart contract, no identity verification awaits them.
- Additionally, Hyperliquid has no position limits. On CME, no single trader can hold positions exceeding a specific size in any contract, to prevent manipulation and systemic risk. Hyperliquid, however, imposes no such restrictions.
- CME closely monitors market-manipulative trading behaviors such as spoofing, wash trading, and coordinated attacks. Hyperliquid, however, has no monitoring system in place to detect these activities.
These are indeed objective facts.
Affected by this news, the HYPE token dropped 9% on May 15. In response, two market makers withdrew $100 million in liquidity on May 18.
coingecko.com
However, note that they are specifically targeting which product—not the cryptocurrency perpetual contracts that Hyperliquid has operated for years without regulatory concern, but rather the crude oil contracts. It is these contracts that generated $720 million in trading volume over the weekend, when CME’s own crude oil market was closed.
The concerns of CME and ICE regarding this regulatory pain are not entirely unfounded, but we are well aware that they are far from neutral observers. Their business model entirely depends on a legally protected “time monopoly.” They don’t mind competing on technology, but they completely lose their composure when someone competes with them on time.
By bringing real trading volume into the oil market over the weekend, Hyperliquid has essentially shattered the traditional finance时空连续统. Meanwhile, those with vested interests are asking governments to force everyone else to close their eyes while they sleep. If it were up to me, I’d prefer to apply for a license to operate on weekends; but obviously, that’s just my opinion.
Hyperliquid’s office in Singapore has only 11 people. Over the 30-day period ending May 21, 2026, the protocol generated $510 million in revenue. In March, it processed up to $2.6 trillion in notional derivatives trading volume.
tokenterminal.com
Hyperliquid routes 97% of trading fees through an on-chain fund to repurchase HYPE tokens. Generating $51 million in monthly revenue with just 11 people, this per-person economic output has no true comparable in either the cryptocurrency industry or beyond. As of late May, HYPE has risen 101% year-to-date.
All of this isn’t necessarily because Hyperliquid built significantly better derivatives from a strict technical standpoint—it’s simply because it remained open when CME was closed, and that carries immense value. Recently, new developments have pushed this logic even further.
On May 1, Trade.xyz, a platform built on Hyperliquid, launched a pre-IPO perpetual futures contract for Cerebras, an AI chip manufacturer. The contract traded for two weeks prior to the IPO. Early in this window, traders erased a roughly 50% premium over the $185 IPO price, implying an opening price of around $277. Subsequent market updates followed. One hour before Cerebras opened on Nasdaq, Trade.xyz’s perpetual futures contract priced the stock at $340—within 3% of the actual opening price. Ultimately, Cerebras opened at $350 on May 14, a 89% surge from its $185 IPO price. Traditional secondary market platforms like Forge and EquityZen had prediction errors of up to 35%, while Hyperliquid’s error was just 3%.
At a time when genuine uncertainty still exists, $277 is the price implied by the market. As information continuously flows in and is absorbed and priced in, collective wisdom eliminates this gap. This is how price discovery is meant to work.
On the following Sunday, May 17, Trade.xyz launched a perpetual futures contract for SpaceX. It opened at a reference price of $150, surged to $216 within hours, and eventually stabilized around $203, implying that the market assigned the company a valuation of $2.4 trillion.
At that time, SpaceX had not yet publicly filed its S-1 prospectus, no Wall Street analysts had issued target prices, and there was no official roadshow.
Traders were completely unaware that SpaceX had secretly submitted a confidential filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as early as April 1, with a targeted valuation range of $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion.
Traders priced the contract at $203, implying a valuation of $2.4 trillion. Before bankers held their first meeting and without access to filed documents, the public had already keenly positioned itself at the upper end of the company’s own target range. Just days later, on Wednesday, May 20, SpaceX officially filed its actual 277-page S-1 prospectus with the public.
Currently, three products are attempting to provide investors with exposure to SpaceX’s investment risk. Each product legally stakes a different solution.
PreStocks is trying to be clever. They set up special purpose vehicle (SPV) funds to purchase actual SpaceX shares, then split and map these fund shares as blockchain tokens so retail investors can get a piece of the action. It looks like a clean backdoor into private tech companies.
However, shortly before Hyperliquid launched its SPCX contract, Anthropic and OpenAI publicly disclaimed any association with third-party SPV products claiming to track their valuations. Platforms in Hong Kong and the UAE had been selling tokenized exposure to these companies without board approval. Both companies issued warnings that the underlying share transfers behind these products were invalid. As a result, PreStocks’ tokens immediately plummeted by 50%. When you attempt to operate by anchoring to actual stocks, the underlying company always retains the right to intervene.
Ondo Global Markets tokenizes stocks through a broker-dealer registered in the United States, with each token backed by an underlying security. Its compliance is exceptionally robust, with the U.S. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) even building settlement infrastructure around it.
However, Ondo’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it has a specific physical office address. If the SEC decides to take action against it, they know exactly whose door to knock on. If Elon Musk raises objections, SpaceX’s lawyers know precisely which custodian to sue. By choosing to play by the rules, Ondo has made itself a perfect target for precise enforcement.
Then let’s look at Hyperliquid’s SPCX contract—this thing is built entirely on thin air.
No equity, no registered broker-dealer, and no claim to any physical asset. It is a synthetic perpetual contract—a complete phantom. A pure bet on a price movement, settled entirely in USDC on a decentralized network.
Even if SpaceX wanted to prevent people from trading derivatives based on its valuation, it couldn’t. No corporate legal entity can be served with legal documents, and there is no central issuer to exert pressure on.
That’s really clever. Hyperliquid essentially figured out: if you have no face, no one can punch you in the face. By anchoring their product to nothing tangible, they’ve become impossible to target.
I'm not sure this is purely a good thing.
A zero-KYC venue that channels trillions of dollars around the global banking system presents a national security nightmare that is difficult to refute. The fact that Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan flew to Washington to meet with policymakers on May 17 is proof enough of how real this pressure is.
Regarding Jeff Yan: he is a real person who has appeared publicly and attended Harvard. If SpaceX wanted to sue him for trademark infringement or intellectual property violation due to his platform listing a contract called "SPCX," they could certainly serve him directly with legal documents.
But suing Jeff won't make this contract disappear.
At PreStocks, if the company deletes the underlying stock, the product ceases to exist. At Ondo, if a judge freezes the bank or custodian, the product becomes stuck. But Hyperliquid’s SPCX is a self-deployed piece of code. Even if Jeff Yan is completely wiped out by lawsuits, those smart contracts are already live, the code is immutable, and the global order book will continue running on-chain.
This is the "flawless theory" of decentralization. Reality is more fragile. Hyperliquid runs on only 20 validators, not 900,000. These validators are identifiable. The JELLY incident has already shown: if they want to intervene, they will intervene. Validators are not immutable.
Once again, time is the only thing they cannot replicate.