Source: Arthur Hayes, founder of BitMEX; Compiled by: Golden Finance

Lift your legs, slide, and step down.

Lift your legs, slide, and step down.

It’s time to turn back, step on, spin, lift, kick out, step on...

Lift your legs, slide, and step down.

Walk through frozen forests and climb steep volcanoes. It was just another day of “ski mountaineering meditation.” Wrapped in the silence of the snow forest, my thoughts wandered freely. It’s amazing what you can create when you focus all your awareness on “putting one ski in front of the other” thousands of times and slowly climbing up a volcano. I loved these three months of silence.

The body and brain crave rest and recovery, and during ski season, that means heading to an actual resort. During my time at the resort, I replaced my sticky skins with a mechanized cable car that can lift people hundreds of meters into the air in just a few minutes. Cable cars and gondolas are great, but sometimes I have to share my silence with others.

I don't like to talk much in the gondola. I sat quietly in the corner, but there are always some "wild guys" at the ski resort who like to strike up conversations with strangers to pass the time.

Their questions may seem mundane, but they allow me to place my interlocutors on their social class map. Inevitably we talked about what I did for a living, as a "ski bum" who was neither a professional guide nor an instructor seemed rather odd to them. I responded politely, but without providing any substantive information to the question: "I work on computers." The great thing about working in technology is that everyone assumes you must have made money in some way, but they can't get to the bottom of it because they may not even understand how electricity works, let alone the crazy things a person can do with a "computer." The conversation usually died down after that, and thanks to Lord Satoshi, it was time to go skate.

What exactly do I or do we do at Maelstrom? We are the hype men who monetize attention.货币化的方式是通过投资比特币和各种“垃圾币”（shitcoins）的头寸（主要是多头，极少数空头）来获利。 By drawing attention to our arguments, we believe that the market, on average, will validate our thesis over time. For now, please focus your attention on Hyperliquid (Token: HYPE).

I don't like shorting because your maximum gain without leverage is only 100%, but your maximum loss is unlimited. I always pursue "long convexity" rather than short; therefore, I am always net long in the market. In the current difficult period when Bitcoin has decisively fallen below its previous historical highs, is there still a high-quality junk coin that can rise in an absolute sense? some. Because in any cryptocurrency sideways or bear market, the best performing crapcoins are usually the exchanges. When prices fall, exchanges still earn fees, sometimes even more than when prices rise, especially if they participate in the long-term growth in decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume.

The last exchange token darling in a sideways down market in early 2023 was GMX. GMX reached an all-time high of $90 in April 2023. Why? Because it dominated the trading volume rankings of perpetual contract DEX at that time. Open interest (OI) and trading volume grew rapidly, driving higher protocol revenue and, more importantly, a significant portion of this revenue went to GMX token holders.

When the consensus outlook for fiat currency credit shifts from growth to contraction, which exchange tokens can skyrocket?

(Data taken from DefiLlama, March 7, 2026)

Hyperliquid, as the dominant perpetual contract DEX, is the largest revenue-generating project outside of stablecoins. 97% of its revenue is used to buy back HYPE tokens from the market. No other project in the entire crypto industry returns as much money to token holders as Hyperliquid. Unfortunately, there is currently nothing like Tether or Circle that allows you to hold and share in its net interest earnings. Therefore, if the market believes that HYPE can continue to suck trading volume away from centralized exchanges (CEX) and add new features to accelerate revenue growth, then HYPE can skyrocket in absolute terms. My price target for HYPE in August 2026 is $150, which is roughly 5x the price of ~$30 at the time of writing.

Getting from hell to Valhalla would require Hyperliquid's 30-day annualized revenue to grow to $1.4 billion, a level it reached last August. To make the remainder of this article more informative, I will post the financial model below.

The key assumptions I had to verify were the Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio and the monthly allocation of HYPE team tokens.

P/E (price-to-earnings ratio) = (circulating supply * price) / (30-day annualized revenue * repurchase rate)

My model calls for total revenue from HIP-3 and non-HIP-3 channels to increase from $843 million in March to $1.4 billion in August. I’ll explain how Hyperliquid regained its all-time high of 30-day annualized revenue in the face of increased competition from perpetual contract DEXs. The last point is to estimate how many HYPE tokens the team will receive each month, taking into account the history of such transactions over the past three months.

It is always useful to "stress test" the model through different scenarios to increase my confidence that the assumptions are reasonable. I'm going to stress-test some assumptions in the negative direction to determine how much Kool-Aid one would have to drink to believe my August price target of $150.

CEX and DEX

The great thing about Hyperliquid is that increasing trading volume does not require an increase in total global crypto perpetual contract trading volume. With just a few percent of CEX’s perpetual contract trading volume migrating to Hyperliquid, Hyperliquid could easily double its 30-day annualized revenue in a matter of months. Just 3.97% market share growth would take Hyperliquid to $1.4 billion in annualized revenue. Considering Hyperliquid didn't even exist less than three years ago, this is entirely possible.

It’s great that Hyperliquid can steal trading volume from CEXs, but which crypto derivatives will lead customers into the loving arms of Jeff (Hyperliquid founder)?

HIP-3 is a protocol that allows permissionless listing of perpetual contracts. If you stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, you can leverage Hyperliquid’s matching and margining engine to create your own market on any asset you like. TradeXYZ does just that, with their flagship products being perpetual contracts on silver, gold, the Nasdaq 100, and the S&P 500. By the way, less than three months after the silver and gold markets were launched, daily transaction volume is already reaching hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. This is where price discovery happens, as the rotten fiat financial system is changing the rules at will to stifle the will of the people to escape the tyranny of money.

Screenshot taken at 11:20 UTC on February 5, 2026

In just four months, HIP-3’s trading volume has accounted for nearly 10% of Hyperliquid’s total revenue. Permissionless listings have long been the holy grail of DEXs, and the rapid growth in trading volume proves this is how Hyperliquid stands out. For Hyperliquid's revenue to grow 66% from March to August, it will take HIP-3 to do the heavy lifting. This is especially true as broader cryptocurrency market capitalization remains depressed. Hyperliquid must provide traders with something new and fun to trade on-chain. Precious metals, AI stocks, and oil are what “the masses” are eager to trade. Now, with perpetual contracts, anyone in the world can trade 24/7 with higher leverage than traditional financial (TradFi) exchanges. For these reasons, my model assumes HIP-3's revenue will grow 160% over six months.

The icing on the cake is prediction markets. Hyperliquid recently announced that HIP-4 will enable the permissionless listing of prediction markets. I expect HIP-4 to be available within the next three months. The prediction markets that speculators will turn to on Hyperliquid will be binary options and 0-day expiry options (0DTE). It's hard to predict how quickly revenue will grow before going live, which is why I didn't put it into the model. If the Hyperliquid team delivers code that's amazing enough to significantly boost revenue, as it has in the past, consider it a bonus.

Unfortunately, Hyperliquid is not the only player in the perpetual contract DEX space. Competition is fierce because this is the next frontier in trading. The onslaught of low or zero-fee perpetual contract DEXs late last year reduced my expected multiple for Hyperliquid earnings. What has changed since then to make me believe again that Hyperliquid’s dominance is unshakable?

Is it real? (Is it real?)

For a cryptocurrency CEX or DEX, it is easy to fake trading volumes. At BitMEX, we used to joke about the “volumizer”; that was a program the exchange used to generate fake trades to increase activity. Many leading exchanges today routinely use quants to claim they are the “biggest” in order to make traders think there is real liquidity. For DEX, it is very simple to create a wallet for wash trade, which is also the source of false trading volume.

"Liquidity mining" is also a proven strategy for generating trader participation. DEX provides traders with points or platform tokens based on their trading volume. Traders “swipe” coins by performing wash trades between wallets.

False trading volume and liquidity mining cannot deepen real liquidity. It is not possible to determine the percentage of trading volume attributable to these activities. The only objective metric for ranking exchanges against each other is to calculate the ADV/OI ratio (average daily volume/open interest). Because traders must put up actual money to margin open positions, OI tells us the extent to which real traders use the platform. ADV is easily watered through fake trading and liquidity mining, but discounting it through OI gives us a measure of organic trading volume driven by risk traders. Therefore, the lower the ADV/OI ratio, the better.

Hyperliquid has the most realistic trading volume among the top 5 perpetual contract DEXs as it has the lowest ADV/OI ratio. As traders realize that liquidity on other platforms is sometimes fake, or that point/token mining is over, they will migrate back to Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid's share of visible ADV will increase over time.这有助于强化 HYPE 作为一种“免疫竞争”的代币叙事。 As you all remember, one of the reasons for my previous tactical short-term bearish stance on HYPE was competition from low/zero fee DEXs. Hyperliquid is best in class in terms of "real" trading volume, so I'm no longer worried about competition, at least for the next six months.

The next thing to consider regarding competition is: which DEX is actually the most liquid, given execution slippage? I took a snapshot of the order books for the Bitcoin/USD perpetual contract on all five platforms and calculated the slippage on executing market buys and sells for $100,000, $1,000,000, and $10,000,000 notional values.

As you can see, it is most of the time cheapest to execute large orders on Hyperliquid. So even if competing platforms have entry order fees that are a basis point or two lower, serious traders will still flock to Hyperliquid because they can place large trades with minimal market impact.

I'm rich, asshole!

The 11-person Hyperliquid team delivers the best DEX product ever. Wealth should flow to them through the locked HYPE tokens they hold. When Maelstrom wrote that HYPE bearish article late last year, he cited the fear of uncertainty about the total amount of tokens the team might dump into the market each month. Since Hyperliquid does not receive venture capital (VC), this was actually an internal political decision between Jeff and his team as to whether they voluntarily decided not to sell the recently unfrozen tokens. They restricted token sales.

After distributing close to 20% of reward tokens in November and December last year, the team distributed approximately 1% of reward tokens in January and February. I'm guessing the initial high percentage allocation was to cover taxes and upgrade team members' lifestyles. After completing this, the team significantly reduced allocations to help $HYPE rebound. This is just my speculation. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. In that spirit, I assume that the monthly allocation will be in line with the four-month average, which is 815,750 coins.

Looking ahead

The market is forward-looking. How much will speculators pay for Hyperliquid's future earnings? HYPE currently trades at about 12 times earnings. How does this compare to traditional financial exchanges?

To gauge what is reasonable, I looked at the current P/E ratios of one of the world's largest exchanges (Chicago Mercantile Exchange "CME"), a variety of traditional financial retail brokers with toxic machismo (Robinhood), and a U.S. state-controlled crypto exchange (Coinbase). P/E ratios range widely, from about 26 to 40. HYPE 以 12 倍的市盈率交易简直是捡漏。 Part of this cheapness is because Hyperliquid is not a public company and therefore has a lower valuation multiple due to smart contract and counterparty risks. Additionally, most major spot CEXs do not allow trading of the HYPE token, so purchasing it is quite difficult for most people. Therefore, it cannot achieve astronomical valuations like many of the crapcoins out there. But a P/E ratio of 12 times is ridiculously low. In just a few months, Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 equity index and precious metals markets have become the price discovery mechanism for TradFi exchanges such as CME when they are closed on weekends. I didn't know computers needed to go golfing on weekends. At the very least, HYPE should have a P/E ratio roughly comparable to CMEgiven the wave of change. Because I want my price target to be a number ending in 0 or 5, I set a HYPE P/E target of 25.2, given all other assumptions. The market will give HYPE a higher P/E multiple as platform revenue regains all-time highs amid weak macro crypto price action.

A note on Market Cap vs Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV): I use Market Cap because it is lower than FDV due to the different circulating supply. Market cap uses tokens currently in circulation, rather than some future end state like FDV. Given that this is a six-month deal, using the current market cap is appropriate. Yes, Hyperliquid may announce another airdrop, which may increase the circulating supply. Given that the Hyperliquid team has not yet hinted that an airdrop is imminent, I will ignore this risk and supply shock.

Stress Test

Let's stress-test our models to incorporate situations that scare us. What happens if the team receives 9,910,000 HYPE tokens per month and the market only pays 12x P/E for expected earnings, but Hyperliquid recaptures $1.4 billion in 30-day annualized revenue?

The price target fell to $58, still about 75% above the current price of $30. Not bad. The reason I'm not testing revenue downward is because if Hyperliquid can't grow revenue from current levels, the token won't rise. If that's your view, don't buy HYPE under any circumstances.

HYPE Man

I charted HYPE/BTC because I wanted to show that the market has realized the value of the coin. As we all painfully know (unless you're short), Bitcoin has fallen significantly since HYPE hit an all-time high of nearly $60 last September. HYPE hit local lows around $20 a few weeks ago. I believe the catalyst for HYPE to resume its rise is the reduction in the team token allocation from 9,910,000 in January to a paltry 140,000. Additionally, with the end of various point and token incentives on rival perpetual contract DEXs, their appeal to traders has rapidly diminished. The rest may or may not be true, but as I showed before, Hyperliquid is the cheapest place to trade based on order book liquidity.

At Maelstrom, we tested the waters around the mid-$20s. On my ski mountaineering trip, I thought to myself: What can I buy if the macro environment is in shambles for a while? What are the highest quality projects that have real users, pay real money, and return that money to token holders? On all these metrics, Hyperliquid is the highest quality project in the entire crypto industry. The process of researching and writing this article has increased my faith. As macro guru Druckenmiller said: “Invest first, investigate later.”

As a result,HYPE has quickly become our largest liquid altcoin position, and we intend to continue selling all other lesser projects in order to own more HYPEin this trading range.

Watch this HYPE, assholes!

Also: Don’t be a coward like Kyle Samani, come take a gamble with me!