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- [00:00]
A
Traders are using hype to get a sense of where is the market pricing certain types of risk when the traditional places where you would trade oil or gold or silver or Nasdaq or S and P500 are all close. It's on Hyper Liquid.
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Pudgy Penguins has become one of the breakout Web three brands. A new Coindesk research report examines how the project turned plush toys, collectibles and trading cards into a customer acquisition engineering generating millions in retail sales while onboarding mainstream users into its digital ecosystem. Discover how the brand is scaling towards a $120 million revenue target and a potential IPO in 2027@coindesk.com research hype has been dominating the conversation this week and my next guest published his thesis on Hyper Liquid predicting its hype token could surge to $150 by August 2026. Arthur Hayes, welcome to Markets Outlook.
- [00:59]
A
Thanks for having me.
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B
Well, thanks for coming back today. We are talking all about Hyper Liquid and Hype really in the spotlight this week. I know that you're very bullish on Hype. I I read your Hype man post. I've been following you on X. But just talk to me a little bit about your Hype thesis.
- [01:17]
A
So obviously last was it August? I came out with a 120x26x prediction for hype price improvement by 2028 and then a few months later I forwarded an essay that the Maelstrom team wrote about why we were selling our Hype position because of the unlocks starting in November the team unlocks and the increased competition from low to no fee perp Dex trading platforms. And so we sold what's our whole position around in the 5055 range. Obviously hype corrected to a low about 20 in Jan. And then all of a sudden I come out and I'm bullish on half again and gets released this essay. So I think the major thing that changed is obviously the team decided that they didn't want to allow themselves it was their own decision to sell the entire amount of monthly hype tokens that they receive as per the tokenomics that everyone has seen. There's no debate about this. That's the first thing. The second thing is that Hype has sort of transitioned to a level above the competition that came online from Lighter and Aster and some of these other newly created per Dexes. They've been able to maybe that they don't have the same market share as they had back in August of 2025, but they're still at, you know, close to 1 billion US doll annualized revenue run rate if you look at a 30 day period of their fees. And what's most promising is HIP3. The permissionless listing has taken the world by storm, especially in these very uncertain times when on the weekends world leaders decided they need to go bomb countries. Markets aren't open. And now traders are using hype to get a sense of where is the market pricing certain types of risk. When the traditional places where you would trade oil or gold or silver or NASDAQ OR S&P 500 are all closed, it's on hyper liquid. And now more and more retail traders are like well I can trade these things 24, 7 whenever I want on chain and I get you know, 10 to 20x leverage trading these traditional products where before I barely got access. And even if I did get access, maybe I got two or three times leverage. And so this is why the hyper liquid product is appealing to a retail trader who is shut out of the main tradfi trading venues across the globe.
- [03:38]
B
You outlined your thesis there for me. What do you think it is about hype that's making it outperform its competitors right now and giving it that, that oomph and that staying power people are actually trading.
- [03:51]
A
So the problem with a new perp Dex is how do you get activity on your platform? There's two ways. One, you lie about your volume. So you create the appearance of having lots of activity on the platform by having multiple wallets engage in wash trading. The second way, we used to call it the volumizer. You'd see like an exchange turn on the volumizer. Oh, look at all that fake volume they're putting through to make it look like there's shiny things happening on their platform. And the second thing you do is you do points programs, liquidity mining, token emissions and essentially traders will engage in activity on the platform trading because they think they're going to get some points or tokens on the back end and so they liquidity farm on the exchange. But none of this is real liquidity because obviously volumizing doesn't actually mean that there's somebody standing there willing to take your trade when you want to trade. It's just, it's fake volume. And then the liquidity mining ends as soon as your incentives end. And so what we wanted to see was okay, well how did hyper liquid do when these other platforms are saying we're going to offer keeper trading supposedly and all these incentives. And the metric that we look at is the average D trailing volume divided by the open interest rate, because open interest requires actual capital to stay on the exchange. That is what I would consider real volume. And so the lower the ratio of the reported trading volume to the open interest, the more genuine the volume is on the platform. We can never know with certainty how much wash trading is going on on a Pentagra platform or how much trading is due purely due to points. So you can only look at this metric as a guiding post. And Hyper Liquid has the lowest ratio of any top per deck. So it is the realest place to trade. And furthermore, when you want to trade big size, you actually want real traders on the other side. And so looking at the slippage to trade $100,000 orders, $10 million orders, and I think we looked at $1 million orders on the Bitcoin US dollar per which is obviously the most rated perp on any of these perp Dex. Hyper Liquid is the most liquid platform so it is the cheapest place to trade objectively. It's the most liquid place to trade objectively and it has the realest volume objectively of any per deck. And that's why we're super excited about it.
- [05:58]
B
You mentioned traders using Hyper Liquid to trade things like oil for example. Over the week, over a weekend when President Trump announced that there was war in the Middle east, we saw a lot of traders take to the platform to, to trade oil. Was that something that was surprising to you?
- [06:17]
A
No, it's a validation of the let's have everything have a per, whether it's a crypto thing or it's a non crypto thing. And this has been a dream for Perex is, you know, for many, many years. Hyperlink was just the first platform to actually execute on it and get volume and traction. And now tutors are like, well why try to open an interactive broker's account and go through all that nonsense of account opening, assuming I can even get one. Let me just get my, you know, EVM wallet or MetaMask, connect to Hyper Liquid and I can trade whatever I want whenever I want as long as I have stables or by coin or whatever it is. The, the funding currency is of these pairs. And so now traders are like, well this is super easy and it's liquid. Now these things are trading hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars a day of average daily trading volume. It's more than enough for retail trader who needs 20x leverage on something highly volatile like oil over a particular weekend.
- [07:08]
B
You're obviously invested in, in hype. We, we've heard your thesis. We've heard of why you're bullish about it. What, what are you watching out for? What are, what are some of those watch outs that you might see happen and say I want to exit this position.
- [07:24]
A
I want to see the price equity ratio, price earnings ratio rise a lot and I want to see a lot of sort of hype around hype, if you want to call it that. Right now people are still like oh it was down 50%. Oh, it's a bear market. There's a lot of reasons why you don't want to be involved in the hyper liquid trade and it's silly. It's outperforming bitcoin in these really choppy times. I want to see everyone super bullish on hype. We're not there yet, so I don't think this is a well held opinion. And then we're going to see how the competition does. Right? Because obviously it's a very lucrative field. I think I saw some metric that hype has something like 70% of all revenue from, from Perp Dex goes to hype. Let's see if they can continue that, that, that dominance.
- [08:14]
B
In your post that we talked about just a few minutes ago, you compared hyperliquid to GMX in 2023. Talk to me about the comparison. What can we learn about hyperliquid when we compare it to how GMX performed back in 23?
- [08:29]
A
So GMX was the largest trading perp Dex back then. Again the thing that we look for real revenue spent by real users and that revenue goes back to the token holders. That was what GMX did and people like oh, Perp Dex is we've got a new winner. This is a thing that we're structurally long because we believe in trading and we know it actually makes money versus a lot of other protocols which are purely just narrative and a future promise of some sort of revenue. These exchanges always make revenue and especially when we go back to fundamentals during bear markets we're looking for quality shitcoins. The exchange tokens always outperform and that's what I was showing with gmx because back in sort of the doldrums of the post FTX bear market, what outperformed GMX did very, very well.
- [09:18]
B
All right, so $150 per token by August 2026 is your prediction. What needs to happen for us to get there?
- [09:29]
A
I think we need to return to an annualized revenue run rate of about 1.4 billion. That's where hyperliquid was back in August of 2020. 6. And they need to continue to emit, you know, very, very little of their team allocation. And so right now they're doing about 1% of what they're allowed to claim is what they're actually sort of vesting to themselves. If they continue that policy, I think people are going to start believing that Hyperliquid has overcome the low to no fee trading platforms and the team has taken a very pro holder stance of hype by not dumping all their tokens on everybody. And that will let people say, oh, the future is going to be very bright for HYP and instead of trading at a 12 PE ratio, it gets up near 30.
- [10:12]
B
What other tokens are you watching right now?
- [10:15]
A
Zcash. So I think the privacy narrative is only starting to heat up, especially as we start to see how easy it is for people to de anonymize bitcoin and other crypto transactions when you have AI agents compared with big data sets, big tech and big government. And so the privacy narrative is only going to pick up in people's minds about how, how do I protect my privacy on chain. I think that's zcash.
- [10:39]
B
Why zcash over some of the other privacy protocols, Some new, some old, like Monero Midnight. Why are you still bullish on zcash?
- [10:50]
A
I'm bullish on zcash because it's the bitcoin code base made private. I'm also bullish on Zcash because some of the cryptographic enhancements they've made since 2016 when this launched. We know that there is no more than trusted setup. It's actually cryptographically proven that it is anonymous. And as sort of the amount of shielded zcash grows, the community is invested in making sure that this is private. And so it becomes even a stronger protocol. And that's why I'm super bullish on zcash.
- [11:19]
B
All right, you're bullish on hype and zcash. You know, I'm not going to let you leave without giving me a bitcoin prediction. I always just got to throw that one in at the end. Does your bitcoin. I don't think that we actually achieved the last bitcoin prediction you gave me. What was it? It was 200,000 by $200,000 by the end of 50,000.
- [11:40]
A
Yeah, 250.
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B
I always confuse it. I'm like, it's 250, it's 200. But either way, we didn't get there. What's your, what's your prediction for this year?
- [11:49]
A
For this year, I'M going to just go the same number. $250,000 Bitcoin.
- [11:53]
B
250,000 by the end of the year. Love a bitcoin prediction. You know, you could just throw out any number with, with optimism, and we just got to see what happen. All right, Arthur, thank you so much for joining the show. As always, it was a pleasure, and I look forward to seeing you at Consensus.
- [12:09]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [12:10]
B
Pudgy Penguins has become one of the breakout Web three brands. A new Coindesk research report examines how the project turned plush toys, collectibles, and trading cards into a customer acquisition engine, generating millions in retail sales while onboarding mainstream users into its digital ecosystem. Discover how the brand is scaling towards a $120 million revenue target and a potential IPO in 2027@coindesk.com.