Note: On June 25, Multicoin Capital released a comprehensive analysis and valuation report on the Hyperliquid token HYPE. This article is the key points of the report; compiled by Golden Finance Claw.

On June 25, US time, Multicoin released a comprehensive analysis and valuation report on Hyperliquid (HYPE). We have been following Hyperliquid since its launch, and we have always been impressed by the success and growth rate achieved by the team. We established a large position earlier this year and have continued to add to it since then. Currently, HYPE is one of the largest holdings in our liquid funds.

We have long believed in the concept of "open finance" - that is, every unit of value should be interoperable, programmable, and composable on a distributed ledger. One of the clearest expressions of this philosophy is building a protocol that allows anyone, anywhere, to trade any asset. We believe that Hyperliquid is the most thorough implementation of this idea we have seen to date.

Hyperliquid is a vertically integrated Layer 1 blockchain and decentralized exchange designed for high-speed trading. In 2025, Hyperliquid generated approximately $873 million in revenue on approximately $2.9 trillion in trading volume. The number of users increased from approximately 301,000 to 923,000, and open interest (OI) reached approximately $6 billion at the end of the year. Currently, Hyperliquid accounts for more than 59% of OI in the DeFi perpetual contract market, and its OI of approximately US$9.6 billion has exceeded the sum of all major chain competitors.

Last year, it also began to take significant market share away from centralized exchanges (CEX). Monthly perpetual contract trading volume has now reached approximately 17% of Binance, compared with almost zero two years ago; OI’s proportion has reached approximately 21%. This growth is not limited to Binance: if compared to all CEX combined, Hyperliquid’s share of perpetual contract trading volume and OI is at an all-time high.

Everything Exchange

Hyperliquid's core perpetual contracts and spot businesses already generate nearly $1 billion in annual revenue, but we believe multiple near-term catalysts will continue to drive growth and help move it toward what we envision as a "single, unified exchange for everything."

First, HIP-3 is actively expanding the platform beyond crypto-native assets. The OI associated with RWA has exceeded US$2.9 billion, and the officially authorized S&P 500 perpetual contract generated an average daily trading volume of more than US$100 million in the first week. Markets launched by deployers such as TradeXYZ now cover oil, gold, silver, stock indices and individual stocks. We expect more deployers to emerge, focusing on specific asset classes or geographic regions, which will further expand the reach of tradable assets on the platform, attracting more traders and trading volumes.

Secondly, HIP-4 will introduce prediction markets and options to the platform, two types of products that have previously failed to find product-market fit in DeFi because they tend to run on isolated protocols. A portfolio margining regime across financial products will enable traders to manage positions across different asset classes within a single risk engine, which will help drive the adoption of HIP-3 and HIP-4. We expect that HyperEVM will eventually allow lending protocols, structured products and other financial applications to directly access Hyperliquid’s prices and liquidity, thereby deepening the liquidity network effect of the entire platform.

Together, these catalysts open up two main growth paths. One is to expand vertically into options, prediction markets and other financial products that leverage Hyperliquid’s existing liquidity and user base. The second is horizontal expansion into traditional financial asset classes such as stocks, commodities, interest rates and foreign exchange, which will significantly expand the platform's total addressable market.

Outlook

Hyperliquid’s development trajectory is strikingly similar to Binance’s early days. In 2017, Binance jumped from an emerging player to a dominant CEX in about six months. The market then (as now) underestimated how quickly liquidity would compound, how powerful the flywheel effect between product selection and trading volume would be, and how much value BNB would be able to capture. We published our BNB report at $10 in 2019, when Binance was widely adopted and firmly established. BNB is trading at around $563 today.

Hyperliquid is following a similar playbook, but with structural advantages that Binance did not have back then. It uses a non-custodial model, execution is fully on-chain and verifiable, and revenue is used for daily token buybacks rather than flowing to an independent equity layer. It is also expanding into commodities, stocks, prediction markets and options, and outsourcing user acquisition (via builder code) to the community.

Alignment between tokens and exchanges is also worth highlighting. HYPE is one of the clearest token designs we have seen in the crypto space. Approximately 99% of the protocol revenue is used to buy back HYPE, which will then essentially be withdrawn from circulation. There is no independent equity layer above the tokens. Hyperliquid has never raised outside financing; no preferred shareholders or VCs have competing claims on the business. The success of the protocol is directly attributed to HYPE, which ensures alignment of interests between the team, users and token holders as everyone participates in the success of the same asset.

Of course, there are real risks in terms of decentralization, governance, supervision, competition, bad debts, and HyperEVM composability, which we will elaborate on in the full report; but we believe that these risks are controllable relative to the potential upside provided by HYPE.

At a price of about $63, HYPE’s TTM price-to-earnings ratio is about 36 times, and if the Coinbase/USDC agreement that is now in effect is included, it is about 30 times. Based on the valuation framework and base-case assumptions discussed in our full report, we expect annualized earnings to reach approximately $8 billion by 2028, corresponding to a price target of approximately $319 based on a 20x P/E ratio.

We believe that Hyperliquid is becoming the exchange of all things: a fully integrated, 24/7 exchange that can trade any asset anytime, anywhere, and has the ability to capture long-lasting token value.