Original title: Semiannual Report: "Inside Hyperliquid's Growth"
Translated by: Asher, Odaily Planet Daily
Editor's Note: In the first half of 2025, Hyperliquid continued to maintain its leading position in the decentralized perpetual contract market. The platform's TVL, open contract volume, and trading volume all reached historical highs, the HyperEVM ecosystem rapidly expanded, and Unit promoted the realization of spot trading. Local applications and Builder Codes accelerated user growth. The HYPE token performed steadily, supported by a unique repurchase mechanism and record revenue, while HIP-3 opened up perpetual market deployment privileges, bringing new profit opportunities to the community. With strategic partners joining and more assets being launched on-chain, Hyperliquid has enormous growth potential in the second half of the year, reshaping the landscape of decentralized trading.
Hyperliquid On-Chain Metrics
TVL and Inflow Volume
The launch of HYPE tokens and the end of the airdrop did not lead to user attrition. On the contrary, Hyperliquid experienced astonishing growth starting from Q4 2024. Notably, inflows surged in November, with daily peaks exceeding $50 million, driving TVL from $564 million to over $2 billion, with a quarterly growth rate of 269%.
Due to continuous growth, Hyperliquid further solidified its dominant position in the decentralized perpetual contract trading space in the first half of 2025. As of June 30, the platform's TVL reached $3.5 billion, a 70.8% increase from the $2.1 billion at the beginning of the year. During the same period, despite experiencing a net outflow shock of $590 million in March, overall inflows remained strong, averaging a net weekly inflow of $58 million.
Open contract volume and trading volume
From first surpassing $1 billion in Q4 2024 to reaching $3.27 billion by the end of the year, Hyperliquid's open contract volume grew by approximately 227% in just a few months. Entering 2025, this figure continued to soar, currently reaching $15 billion, a year-on-year increase of about 359% compared to the end of 2024, equivalent to 61% of ByBit, 105% of OKX, and 120% of Bitget.
In Q4 2024, Hyperliquid's weekly trading volume was approximately $13 billion, significantly increasing to an average of $47 billion in the first half of 2025, peaking at a historical high of $78 billion in the week of May 12. Meanwhile, its market share expanded simultaneously, rising from about 56% at the end of 2024 to over 73% by the end of Q1 2025, further solidifying its industry-leading position.
In terms of user scale, the number of user addresses on Hyperliquid grew from 291,000 to over 518,000 in the first half of 2025, a 78% increase over six months. This growth not only reflects the rapid expansion of the platform's user base but also corresponds to over $53 billion in liquidated positions, demonstrating the activity and depth of the market.
Comparison of Hyperliquid and CEX Data
In the first half of 2025, Hyperliquid's growth relative to centralized exchanges (CEXs) was particularly remarkable. As of now:
Hyperliquid's trading volume share reached 6.1%, an increase of 3.9 percentage points compared to January of this year.
The proportion of open contracts on Hyperliquid reached 17.8%, an increase of 12.3 percentage points compared to January of this year.
Firstly, Hyperliquid has the lowest cost for trading spot and perpetual contracts in the ecosystem, while providing deep on-chain liquidity. For certain assets, the order book depth can rival that of leading CEXs. For example, during the launch of PUMP, the platform achieved the deepest market depth, highest trading volume, and tightest bid-ask spread, marking the first time in DEX history.
Secondly, Hyperliquid has become the preferred platform for the launch of new tokens. Since the launch of Trump Coin, the platform has continuously prioritized the launch of perpetual contracts, a strategy that quickly attracted users and reinforced the platform's recognition as the first choice for trading new tokens. Additionally, PUMP raised approximately $500 million in just 12 minutes after its launch. Hyperliquid was the first platform to launch both spot and perpetual contracts simultaneously and provided pre-trading opportunities, validating its ability to attract users and liquidity.
Today, Hyperliquid can match leading CEXs in terms of trading speed, liquidity, and user experience, while retaining the advantages of decentralization: permissionless access, on-chain transparency, and native composability, allowing any asset, position, or trade to integrate directly with smart contracts, dApps, or other protocols on HyperEVM.
HLP: Core Liquidity Engine and Robust Revenue
HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider) is Hyperliquid's core liquidity engine, providing USDC liquidity for the order book, market making, and automatic liquidation, while integrating various yield strategies to offer users non-directional exposure. HLP's TVL saw significant growth by the end of 2024, driven by the HYPE airdrop, rising from $150 million at the end of November to over $400 million by early 2025, peaking at $512 million in May, and stabilizing at $372 million in the first half of the year.
During the same period, HLP's net profit increased from $50 million to $68 million, with users enjoying an average annualized return of about 11%. Despite the Jelly incident (click here for more details), the net profit for the first quarter of 2025 was still 5.2%, with a decline of less than 3.5%.
Unit: The Key to Hyperliquid's Future
Unit launched on February 14, 2025, serving as Hyperliquid's asset tokenization layer. It supports the native deposit and withdrawal of various assets and directly lists assets on the Hyperliquid spot market through an auction system, initially supporting BTC and later expanding to ETH, SOL, FARTCOIN, PUMP, BONK, and others.
Since its launch, Unit's TVL has reached $800 million, second only to Kinetiq; the asset volume traded through Unit in the first half of the year exceeded $15 billion. Nevertheless, Hyperliquid's spot trading volume still only accounts for 2% of the total trading volume, far below the 15%-30% ratio of most centralized exchanges, indicating that it is still in the early stages.
HyperEVM On-Chain Metrics
HyperEVM launched in February 2025, this blockchain is EVM compatible and built directly on Hyperliquid's infrastructure, supporting the deployment of smart contracts and decentralized applications.
TVL
Despite the TVL being below $50 million in early February, just two months after the mainnet deployment (mid-April), the TVL surpassed $1 billion and reached $2.08 billion by June 30, achieving a doubling growth.
Number of active addresses
In the first half of 2025, the user activity of HyperEVM steadily improved, with an average of approximately 33,000 active addresses daily, peaking over 44,000 in June.
Additionally, trading volume shows a similar trend, averaging around 208,000 trades per day, with peaks reaching 315,000 trades.
In terms of economic performance, applications on HyperEVM generate approximately $1.927 million in fees daily, peaking at $4.855 million on May 21, with total accumulated fees currently reaching $256.2 million.
HYPE Revenue and Buybacks
Unlike most DeFi protocols, the Hyperliquid team does not directly take platform fees; all revenue is distributed to HLP and the Assistance Fund. HLP is a community treasury that provides market-making income to users; the Assistance Fund is valued in HYPE and acts as a liquidity reserve when needed.
Data in recent months shows that approximately 92% of fees flow to the Assistance Fund, with the remaining 8% allocated to HLP. The Assistance Fund uses its income from the HYPE repurchase plan to buy back tokens in the spot market, thereby supporting the HYPE price and directly benefiting token holders.
Since the beginning of 2025, Hyperliquid's total revenue has reached $406 million (annualized over $810 million), making it one of the most profitable protocols in the crypto industry, second only to Tether and Circle. The first quarter saw a significant increase in fees, rising from approximately $1 million per day to an average of $3 million, peaking at over $5 million.
Additionally, the Assistance Fund can repurchase approximately 13% of the HYPE supply each year. With the launch of HIP-3 and Builder Codes (represented by Phantom), Hyperliquid fees will further increase, thereby strengthening the repurchase model and supporting token value (as of this writing, based on data from the past 30 days, the annualized income is approximately $1 billion, resulting in a price-to-earnings ratio of about 15 based on the circulating supply).
Key events for Hyperliquid in the first half of the year
In January 2025, Hyperliquid expanded the number of validators to 27 and launched the TRUMP perpetual contract, with trading volume exceeding $21 billion for two consecutive days.
In February 2025, Unit launched, achieving native asset deposits of $400 million, with spot trading volume reaching $8.4 billion; HyperEVM was launched, and TVL reached $2 billion.
In March 2025, the Jelly incident resulted in HLP losing $12 million, with users compensated.
In May 2025, the HIP-3 testnet allowed the community to deploy new perpetual markets while introducing Staking Tiers and new stablecoins USDe and USDT0.
In June 2025, multiple publicly traded companies incorporated HYPE into their corporate treasury, with Hyperliquid's annualized revenue exceeding $800 million, of which 97% was used for HYPE repurchases.
In July 2025, CoreWriter was launched, enabling bidirectional write access for HyperCore and HyperEVM, with Builder Codes integrating Phantom Perps, adding approximately 20,000 users and expected annual revenue of $15 million to $30 million.
Summary
In the first half of 2025, Hyperliquid continued to solidify its leadership position in the decentralized perpetual contract market, with outstanding on-chain metrics, accelerating adoption of HyperEVM, and rapid expansion of the local application ecosystem. The HYPE token performed steadily, supported by a unique repurchase mechanism and record revenues, demonstrating the sustainability of the protocol's economic model.
More broadly, Hyperliquid continuously opens up new growth spaces by enhancing liquidity and infrastructure advantages while promoting the development of HIP-3, CoreWriter, and Builder Codes. With strategic partners like Phantom joining and the rise of native protocols on HyperEVM, the network possesses robust growth potential for the second half of the year.
Among them, HIP-3 is the core driver: any user holding 1 million HYPE can deploy perpetual contracts and earn up to 50% of trading fee revenue without incurring infrastructure costs, with Hyperliquid providing full support. The integration of Phantom has already shown effects, and this alone is expected to bring about 2%-4% annual cash flow growth; if more wallets or front ends follow, the potential will be further amplified.
With the U.S. SEC launching a new on-chain asset program, Hyperliquid is expected to support more asset types, unlocking more growth opportunities.
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