BlockBeats report, August 10: Trading activity on Hyperliquid continues to grow, but protocol revenue has been declining consecutively. On July 13, its open interest rose to slightly over $11 billion, reaching a new high for 2026; over the past 30 days, perpetual contract trading volume approached $178 billion, currently accounting for approximately 9% of global perpetual contract open interest. Meanwhile, DefiLlama data shows that its total protocol revenue has been declining since peaking at around $357 million in the third quarter of 2025, dropping to approximately $202 million in the second quarter of 2026—a 43% decline from the peak.
Revenue decline is related to HIP-3 market expansion. Since October 2025, developers staking 500,000 HYPE have been able to deploy their own perpetual markets on the Hyperliquid order book and retain up to 50% of trading fees. At the beginning of this year, such markets accounted for approximately 2% of the platform’s perpetual trading volume; this has now risen to about half. During the same period, Hyperliquid’s cost of revenue as a percentage of total revenue increased from under 6% in Q2 2025 to 18% a year later.
The fastest-growing segment is RWA perpetuals. Contracts tied to crude oil, gold, NVIDIA, Tesla, the Nasdaq 100 index, and private companies like SpaceX reached a record open interest of $3.6 billion this month, surpassing Bitcoin to become the platform’s largest market. Between July 13 and 19, tokenized stocks and commodities traded $25 billion, accounting for 52% of total weekly volume and surpassing crypto perpetuals for the first time. However, Trade.xyz accounts for over 90% of all HIP-3 open interest, making the platform’s new trading activity heavily reliant on a single deployment.
Approximately 97% of Hyperliquid's trading fees go into the Assistance Fund to purchase and burn HYPE on the open market, cumulatively reducing supply by about 44.5 million tokens. However, as revenue declines, buyback volume has dropped from nearly $290 million in Q3 2025 to approximately $149 million in Q2 2026. Meanwhile, on August 6, nearly 10 million HYPE tokens unlocked to core contributors, valued at approximately $550 million at the time, and similar monthly unlocks will continue through 2027. If the revenue growth of about $45 million over the first four weeks of Q3 continues, total quarterly revenue could reach around $150 million, potentially marking the fourth consecutive quarter of decline.