Yesterday, at a White House press conference with crypto and financial-sector CEOs, President Trump named Hyperliquid directly:

“I understand that Mike [Selig, the CFTC Chair] is also working very hard to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion.” President Trump, White House, August 19, 2026

The market's reaction was immediate: HYPE gained +20%.

That one sentence removes the single largest overhang on HYPE's forward earnings: regulatory access to the largest capital market in the world. Hyperliquid was always going to keep growing globally without the United States, it simply becomes too large to ignore. But for HYPE's “house of all finance” thesis to fully play out, this was the missing piece. From a game-theory standpoint, it also makes sense for Washington: bring the largest and most liquid onchain derivatives venue home, regulate it without strangling its growth, and keep the innovation, the users, and the activity domestic. It's a template that can plausibly ease regulatory pressure elsewhere in parallel, rather than watching volume permanently route around US jurisdiction.

The bull case just got a lot bigger.

Below, using data pulled directly from HRC × HL Eco's live dashboard , is why it's difficult not to be extremely bullish from here.

1. Hyperliquid Strategies ($PURR): The Printing Machine

$PURR — Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. (NASDAQ: PURR), the largest HYPE digital asset treasury, is back trading at a premium to net asset value. At the time of writing it carries a fully diluted mNAV of 1.14x, a 14% premium to adjusted NAV: a HYPE treasury of 29.28M tokens (2.93% of circulating supply, ~$2.14B at market), a live adjusted NAV of $2.04B, and an unrealized gain on its HYPE position of roughly $1B, +109.65% against a $34.91 average cost basis.

The job of a DAT is to run treasury management that grows HYPE-per-share over time: issue equity when it trades at a premium to NAV and use the proceeds to buy more HYPE; buy back equity when it trades at a discount and retire it accretively. $PURR has executed this well historically, every sustained premium has been followed by share issuance funding further HYPE accumulation, and the last significant discount period saw the team acquire hundreds of millions of dollars of HYPE in a short window, alongside large ETF inflows.

That precedent is visible in the aggregate structural bid, AF buybacks, priority burn, ETF inflow, and DAT purchases combined into one monthly view. May and June 2026, the last stretch $PURR traded at a sustained premium, produced the two largest months on record: roughly $520M in May and a peak of $694.32M in June. Over the trailing twelve months, the components total $686.46M in AF buybacks, $344.41M in ETF inflow, and $745.34M in DAT purchases (plus in priority burn and EVM gas burn).

With this regulatory clarity coming, we expect large inflows into $PURR and the ETFs, because HYPE is the most reflexive play on crypto volume and volatility, but also the purest play on RWAs moving onchain. That's why we expect $PURR to trade at a premium to mNAV for a significant period, ETFs to see large inflows for a significant period, and all of this to turn into large buying pressure for HYPE. Below, we go through why we believe the Assistant Fund is also about to turn much more aggressive.

2. Crypto Volume: The Cash Cow Back in Motion?

We believe crypto volume and volatility have likely bottomed. It's no surprise HYPE's volume has mostly traded down over the past 12 months.

The 30- and 90-day EMAs of total platform volume peaked near $14B (daily, one-sided taker) in late August 2025, and have spent most of the period since grinding lower, with two clear reflexive bumps, a smaller one in January 2026 and a larger one in June 2026 — before drifting back down into August.

There are a lot of different explanations for this but, Bitcoin is the largest single driver of that trend: it represents roughly 36% of Hyperliquid's all-time trading volume ($1.93T of $5.35T lifetime volume across 684 markets), with ETH (22.9%) and SOL (7.29%) making up most of the rest. Hyperliquid's native volume has effectively tracked the broader market's compression in risk appetite over the past year; with the “debasement trade” narrative around Bitcoin being back and a cyclical low in BTC, and volatility more broadly, is in, native crypto volume on Hyperliquid should mean-revert higher alongside it.

More importantly, the volume mix has already shifted decisively even while the headline trend was falling. HIP-3 and Trade[XYZ] have absorbed a growing share of total activity since Q4 2025:

As we'll discuss below, the volume downtrend has been mitigated by Trade[XYZ] and HIP-3 adoption since Q4 2025, but those markets are still in growth mode and don't generate the same revenue per dollar of volume traded. This is a strategic decision that's proving very efficient, because RWA markets are seeing a wave of adoption this industry has never seen before and it's all happening on Hyperliquid, now representing between 40-50% of Hyperliquid's total volume (see 30d/90d EMA below).

3. Forward Earnings: Up Only

3.1 Revenue trough, mix shift not yet monetized

As a result of the above, we believe Hyperliquid revenue will trend back up again. On a 30-day average, we were basically at all-time lows, as crypto's share of volume kept decreasing on Hyperliquid.

With regulatory clarity now arriving at the same time we believe crypto volume has bottomed, we would expect this revenue trend to inflect and re-accelerate materially from here.

3.2 HIP-3 and Trade[XYZ]: pricing power still untapped

Trade[XYZ], the dominant HIP-3 deployer, closed Q2 2026 with quarterly revenue of $7.59M and an annualized run-rate of $37.72M, up 32.9% quarter-over-quarter on 79.2% volume growth. We believe Trade[XYZ] and Hyperliquid both have materially more pricing power than the current fee structure implies. At 2x the current take rate, the same recent activity already implies an annualized run-rate of $84–97M (7/14/30-day averages), approaching $100M a year without even factoring in that Trade[XYZ] has separately used part of its own cash flow, at its own discretion, to buyback HYPE.

Given the growth Trade[XYZ] has already posted with no US regulatory clarity, a 2x, 3x, 5x, or even 10x expansion in HIP-3 volume over the next 12-24 months is a reasonable base case once the addressable market legally expands.

Beyond pricing power, the more structural shift is on the supply side of HIP-3 itself. Regulatory clarity doesn't just bring more traders, it changes the calculus for the deployers and builders deciding where to launch a market in the first place. With the largest and most consequential regulatory jurisdiction in the world now moving toward a compliant path, the risk premium builders have historically priced into choosing Hyperliquid collapses. We expect the universe of assets trading on Hyperliquid, the number of active deployers, and the quality of distribution behind each new market to grow meaningfully, plausibly not just linearly but exponentially, from here, as building on Hyperliquid goes from a calculated bet to the obvious default.

Looking further out, the next catalysts for Trade[XYZ] are already visible on the horizon: pre-IPO markets for Anthropic and OpenAI. Both companies are widely expected to eventually go public, and we would expect Trade[XYZ] to list pre-IPO perpetual markets on both well ahead of any actual listing — letting Hyperliquid become the venue of record for price discovery on two of the most closely watched names in the world, 24/7, before traditional markets can offer any equivalent. That is the same dynamic that put Hyperliquid's oil perpetuals in the spotlight during the Iran-strike disruption and brought the S&P 500 onto a DEX for the first time, a moment that puts all eyes on Hyperliquid again, and adds another leg of volume and revenue growth independent of the regulatory catalyst above.

3.3 AQAv2 USDC Research Yield: a structural, less seasonal revenue stream

The AQAv2 Research Yield program directs a, assumed "90%" share of the implied yield on Hyperliquid's USDC supply back to the protocol. At current parameters, a $6.28B USDC supply and a 3.00% reserve yield rate, that implies roughly $169.68M annualized to the protocol, or about $14.14M a month (~$464.88K a day, ~6.5K HYPE bought daily) in additional, largely volume-independent buyback flow.

Note: we don't know yet what the 90% after cost actually means.

This meaningfully diversifies the revenue base away from trading volume and seasonality, layering directly on top of the buying pressure already coming from AF buybacks, DAT accumulation, and ETF inflows.

4. Metrics Pointing at All-Time Highs: OI, Users & Share vs. CEXs

Open interest. Platform-wide open interest has rebounded to within range of its all-time high — the $12.87B peak set in September 2025, just before the October 10 crash, after bottoming near $6.4B in February 2026.

Market share vs. centralized exchanges. Hyperliquid's market share against Binance, OKX, and Bybit is all at ATH, with significant % gains QoQ and YoY.

Unique traders. Daily unique traders hit a quarterly average record of 57.48K in Q3 2026, up from 50K in Q2 and roughly flat through most of 2025. With US regulatory clarity now visibly in motion, we'd expect this to inflect further via builder codes, US-based distribution, and native user growth.

Conclusion: up only?

We're in the sweet spot where everything seems to be aligning almost too perfectly. We don't see any reason to be bearish here, and we see a ton of reasons to make our previous best case the current base case because everything we could have hoped for in the bull case is happening right in front of us.

On valuation: HYPE trades at a circulating P/E of 22.6x on trailing-365-day operating net income of $946.01M against a $21.40B circulating market value. Using the OTS framework HRC developed together with Hyperliquid Strategies, it's trading at 36.1x.

The thing is, this market has always looked at trailing 30 days to value protocols in this industry instead of taking a forward-looking view. On a two-year forward basis, we don't see any reason why Hyperliquid's revenue wouldn't 2x, 3x, 5x, or even 10x from here, given all the catalyst alignment we currently have.

That makes HYPE super cheap even at these levels.

There are so many exciting things I didn't even bring up in this article... wanted to keep it concise, but I could talk about HYPE all day long.

Exciting. Onwards.

HYPERLIQUID.


Full disclosure: HRC/GLC owns HYPE and is building on top of Hyperliquid, and is accordingly biased. This note reflects our own views, is not investment advice, and should not be relied upon as the basis for any investment decision.
All figures and charts are sourced live from hl.eco/financials, the Hyperliquid financial data and research hub operated by HRC in partnership with HL Eco, as of August 20, 2026, unless otherwise noted.