The giant whale stirs up the storm, HYPE price hits a new high, Hyperliquid comes out of the trough and the data explodes

Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives exchange, has regained crypto market attention as whales drive significant activity, with contract open interest hitting a record $9.31 billion, nearing OKX's levels.
Trading volume surged to $714 million on May 23, a 3x increase from early May, while fees over 30 days reached $62 million, ranking 8th among protocols.
After a March downturn due to exploit incidents, net capital inflows rebounded to $3.5 billion by May 26, fueled by whale activity like James Wynn's high-value orders.
HYPE, Hyperliquid's governance token, soared 329% from April's low to $39.9, surpassing SUI's market cap to rank 13th.
Ecosystem growth includes 27 protocols (16 exclusive), with TVL hitting $1.46 billion, and new cross-chain tools enhancing asset flows. Stablecoin issuance ($3.6B) now exceeds Arbitrum and Aptos.
Challenges remain: slow new user growth (~hundreds daily), limited trader diversity (~30k daily), and lingering trust issues from March's HLP vault exploit, with deposits still 30% below pre-attack levels.
Despite these hurdles, Hyperliquid's data explosion and whale-driven transparency showcase its rising influence in decentralized trading.

Author: Frank, PANews

Recently, as whales have created "storms" on Hyperliquid, this decentralized derivatives exchange is re-entering the spotlight of the crypto world from a new perspective after being "sniped". This former challenger is now truly shaking up the traditional territory of centralized exchanges with a series of impressive data performance and rapid expansion of the ecosystem.

In this article, PANews deeply analyzes Hyperliquid's recent data, striving to fully present the true picture of Hyperliquid's development.

Contract open interest hits new highs, close to OKX

On May 23, Hyperliquid's open interest reached $9.31 billion, setting a new record high. This figure is more than double the previous high of $4.4 billion in December last year. BTC and ETH account for about half of the contract positions.

Comparing with some mainstream CEX data, Hyperliquid's contract holdings are similar to OKX. In terms of Bitcoin contract holdings, it is similar to OKX, Bitget, HTX and other exchanges, ranking between 5th and 7th. On May 23, Hyperliquid's DEX trading volume reached US$714 million, a three-fold increase from US$200 million at the beginning of the month.

As trading heat increases, Hyperliquid's revenue has also improved dramatically. In the past 30 days, Hyperliquid has generated fees of $62 million, making it the 8th highest-grossing protocol, second only to Jito and Pump.fun, and even higher than Tron and Solana.

In March, Hyperliquid frequently encountered incidents where traders obtained huge profits through order book loopholes (Related reading: Hyperliquid was hit by lightning again, a thrilling plot of life and death in 2 hours, and there was no winner in the hunting bureau of the top exchanges). From that period, we can see that Hyperliquid's capital inflow experienced a sharp decline. From March 1 to April 7, Hyperliquid's funds fell from US$2.47 billion to US$1.85 billion, a decrease of about 25%. However, as the whales returned again and frequently opened huge contract orders to attract market attention, Hyperliquid's capital inflow began to reverse. As of May 26, Hyperliquid's net capital inflow had grown to about US$3.5 billion. This data not only recovered the difference in previous losses, but also created a new high. Especially after entering May, this inflow change was more obvious. The highest single-day net inflow reached US$240 million, and the average daily net inflow reached US$53 million.

These capital inflows are inseparable from the orders placed by whales such as James Wynn. Since May, many whales, including James Wynn and "50x Brother", have frequently placed contract orders worth tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars on Hyperliquid. With the real-time observation of on-chain analysts, the operations of these whales have become a hot topic in the market. At the same time, this has also served as an invisible advertisement for Hyperliquid. Interestingly, this transparent on-chain operation has formed an order-carrying effect, which has become a unique advantage of Hyperliquid as a decentralized exchange, which is difficult for traditional CEX to imitate.

The token market value exceeds SUI, and multiple new protocols in the ecosystem are expected to have airdrops

Under the premise of overall positive data, Hyperliquid's governance token HYPE hit a bottom of $9.3 in April and began to rise sharply. As of May 27, HYPE's highest price rose to $39.9, with a maximum increase of about 329%. The market value of HYPE tokens also reached a maximum of $12.9 billion, surpassing SUI to become the 13th token in terms of market value.

In the ecological field, Hyperliquid has also made some new progress recently. In April, external DeFi protocols such as Morpho and Upshift began to be deployed to Hyperliquid. There are also multiple exclusive protocols in the ecosystem that have begun to operate. The TVL of multiple protocols such as HyperLend, Felix, and HypurrFi exceeds 100 million US dollars. As of May 27, Hyperliquid's TVL reached 1.46 billion US dollars, and the number of protocols also increased to 27, of which 16 are Hyperliquid's exclusive protocols. And many of these protocols are in the early stages, and some have already launched points plans, which have great airdrop potential.

In addition, the situation of previously relying on Arbitrum for capital flow has also changed significantly. New cross-chain bridge tools such as Hyperunit, HyperSwap, and HyBridge support direct capital flow of more on-chain assets. At the same time, in terms of the issuance of stablecoins, Hyperliquid ranks sixth among all public chains with a stablecoin market value of US$3.6 billion. It has surpassed other public chains with longer construction time, such as Arbitrum, Aptos, Sui, and TON. Among them, USDC, which has the largest issuance volume, accounts for 97% of the issuance volume with a market value of US$3.5 billion, while the current issuance volume of feUSD, which is unique to Hyperliquid, is only US$51 million, and is still in its early stages. In addition, USDT's full-chain stablecoin USDT0 was also launched on Hyperliquid in May. Although the current issuance volume is not high, it has also brought a new important channel for Hyperliquid's capital flow.

There are shadows under the spotlight, and user growth and trust are facing challenges

Although most of the data seem to be going well, there are some data that do not change significantly. For example, the cumulative number of new users has not shown a surge in the near future. There are only a few hundred new users per day, which is significantly different from the thousands of new users per day when Hyperliquid was first launched. It seems to be weak in the entry of newcomers. In addition, although the number of independent traders per day has increased to a certain extent recently, reaching more than 30,000 at the highest. However, this data performance is still far behind other centralized exchanges. In terms of trading categories, the share of three tokens such as BTC, ETH, and SOL has long hovered around 50%, and the trading volume of other types of tokens seems to be difficult to break through, which also makes it difficult for Hyperliquid's newly launched tokens to form the "currency effect" of other head exchanges. Judging from the data, the recent coin auctions are also relatively quiet, and the auction prices are basically between US$20,000 and US$30,000.

In addition, in the previous lightning attack, Hyperliquid's biggest direct loss came from the loss of income from the HLP vault. As the main source of liquidity, the income of the HLP vault dropped directly from 63 million US dollars to 4 million US dollars. However, according to recent data, the current HLP income has returned to 64.7 million US dollars, breaking a new high. But from another perspective, this sequelae has not been completely resolved. The deposit amount in the vault dropped from a minimum of 500 million US dollars to 149 million US dollars in March, and 60% of the deposits were lost at that time. Although this figure has recently rebounded to 350 million US dollars, it is still about 30% different from the original high. This shows that the lightning attack at that time did affect the trust of these large depositors in Hyperliquid to a great extent, and it has not been fully restored until now.

Overall, Hyperliquid has undoubtedly delivered a brilliant report card recently. Whether it is the exponential growth of core data such as contract holdings and transaction volume, or the market performance of the native token HYPE, it has demonstrated a strong upward momentum and high market attention. In particular, the entry of giant whales and transparent operations on the chain have brought a new wave of free market promotion to Hyperliquid.

However, there are also concerns behind the glamour. The slowdown in new user growth and the full restoration of trust from major HLP vault depositors are issues that Hyperliquid must face and resolve before moving to a higher level. But overall, Hyperliquid's performance has proven to the industry that this emerging platform is gradually becoming a force that cannot be ignored among trading platforms.