Hyperliquid’s RWA perps boom is eating into the revenue that backs HYPE

FinanceHyperliquid’s RWA perps boom is eating into the revenue that backs HYPERevenue has fallen four quarters running while open interest hit a record high. The gap is a fee-sharing program that hands half the platform's volume to outside builders.By Shaurya Malwa|Edited by Cheyenne Ligon1 hr ago4 min readMake preferred on ShareShare this articleCopy linkX iconX (Twitter)LinkedInFacebookEmailMake preferred on Hyperliquid has never traded more contracts, and it has never kept a smaller share of the money those contracts earnOpen interest, the total value of leveraged positions traders hold at one time, climbed to just above $11 billion on July 13, the platform's highest in 2026. Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures volume over the past 30 days ran to nearly $178 billion. Hyperliquid now settles roughly 9% of all open perp positions worldwide, centralized exchanges included, up from under 7% in late May.But the platform’s revenue has gone the other way. Gross protocol revenue peaked at roughly $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 and has fallen every quarter since, to nearly $295 million, then roughly $217 million, then about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026, DefiLlama data shows. That is a 43% drop from the top, booked while the trade count climbed.Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal (HIP-3) helps explain why Hyperliquid is keeping less of the activity it attracts. Since October 2025, anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, can deploy their own perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid's order books and keep up to half the trading fees.At the start of 2026 these builder-deployed markets were about 2% of Hyperliquid's perp volume. They are now roughly half of it.The pass-through shows up in the accounts. Cost of revenue, the portion of fees Hyperliquid hands straight back to builders, market makers and its own liquidity vault, was under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025. A year later it was 18%.Builder code f…

Hyperliquid’s RWA perps boom is eating into the revenue that backs HYPE

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