Arthur Hayes is making a bullish bet on Hyperliquid, arguing in a new essay that HYPE could rise to $150 by August 2026, even if the broader crypto fundamentals remain weak. His case relies on a familiar playbook of exchange tokens, but updated for a market where decentralized, rather than centralized, places are more likely to capture the most valuable trade flows.
Why Hayes Thinks Hyperliquid Could Reach $150
Hayes positions Hyperliquid as an outstanding asset in a slow or sideways market because exchanges can maintain fee generation regardless of rising prices. According to him, this is even more important for Hyperliquid because 97% of the protocol’s revenue is used to buy HYPE from the market. “Hyperliquid, the dominant DEX, is the largest profitable non-stablecoin project,” he said. “No other project in crypto hands has given back to token holders like Hyperliquid.”
His target is about 5x from around $30 at the time of writing. To achieve that, Hayes says Hyperliquid needs to reach $1.4 billion in 30-day annual revenue, a level he says the platform previously achieved last August. His model also estimates that the market will trade the token from around 12 times earnings to around 25.2 times, which is still below or close to the range he cites for major names on traditional exchanges.
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A big part of the thesis is that Hyperliquid doesn’t need a general expansion in crypto derivatives activity to grow. It just needs to keep its share of the centralized exchange. Hayes argues that a 3.97 percent increase in market share would be enough for Hyperliquid to return to that $1.4 billion annual revenue level.
The engine for this next leg, he says, is HIP-3, Hyperliquid’s unlicensed listing framework. Users with 500,000 HYPE can begin trading using the appropriate engine and margin platform, and Hayes points to early pullbacks in silver, gold, the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500. “In just four months, the volume of HIP-3 is about 10% of the total revenue of Hyperliquid,” he wrote. “Permissive listings have always been the holy grail of DEXs, and the rapid growth in trading volume proves how Hyperliquid differentiates itself from the pack.”
Therefore, his model predicts that HIP-3’s revenue will increase by 160% in six months. He also flags HIP-4, which he says should enable unlicensed prediction markets because a possible upside shock is not included in the main case.
Competition is the main objection that Hayes tries to neutralize. He believes that the volume of headers across DEXs can be distorted by wash trading, point farming and other incentives, which make the raw volume an insufficient measure of actual usage.
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His preferred metric is ADV-to-OI, or average daily volume relative to open interest, because open interest should post actual capital. In this context, he says that Hyperliquid has the most “real” volume among the top five DEXs. He also says that snapshots of the order book for Bitcoin perps show that Hyperliquid was usually the cheapest place to execute the measure after the slide entered.
Hayes is also spending time on an oversupply of tokens, another issue that brought him down tactically late last year. He notes that the team distributed about 20% of the awarded tokens in November and December, but only about 1% in January and February. “In this way, the team has significantly reduced the distribution to help the recovery of HYPE,” he said while acknowledging that this part is speculative.
Even his stressful situation remains constructive. Hayes says that if the market only pays 12 times earnings and the team earns 9.91 million HYPE per month, but revenue returns to $1.4 billion annually, the token will still be worth about $58, or about 75% of current levels.
At press time, HYPE was traded for $33,237.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
