SK Hynix (Korea Exchange: 000660), the South Korean maker of the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that feeds Nvidia and Google's AI accelerators, has spent six weeks as one of the most-traded names on offshore crypto perpetuals; one day before its Nasdaq debut on 10 Jul, it rebounded on its home market in Seoul.
Crypto Rings the Bell for SK Hynix before Nasdaq
9 July 2026 - 06:43 CEST
By Oihyun Kim
Hot on the KOSPI
On its home turf, the chipmaker is the semiconductor cycle's biggest winner. With a 50–70% share of the global HBM market, per Reuters, it has climbed about 260% this year on AI-driven memory demand, to a market value of roughly $1tn, second only to Samsung on the KOSPI, Korea's benchmark index.
The rally has pulled in leverage: Korea's 2x single-stock ETFs on the name jumped 17–18% at the 9 Jul open, when the shares rose 9.3% before easing to 4.1% by 03:30UTC, after three losing sessions.
Offshore, second to Bitcoin
That rise did not stay onshore. For six weeks, the name has ranked among the most active stock perpetuals anywhere.
On Hyperliquid, an onchain derivatives venue, the SKHYNIX-USDC perpetual, which tracks an external price index of the Seoul-listed shares rather than setting a price of its own, traded about $902mn in 24 hours by 03:30UTC on 9 Jul, the venue's second most-traded market behind Bitcoin (BTC) and ahead of Ether (ETH).
On Binance, the SKHYNIXUSDT contract traded about $2.2bn, with longs paying a funding fee near 0.46% every eight hours to hold the position, up from about 0.17% earlier in the session and more than 40 times the rate on Bitcoin or Ether.
Binance opened its market on 2 Jun, and Hyperliquid earlier this year through its permissionless HIP-3 framework, where a market maker can create such a contract. A perpetual is not the underlying share and conveys no ownership.
The Nasdaq debut
Now the same name reaches Nasdaq. On 10 Jul it lists about $28bn–$29.4bn of shares as American depositary receipts (ADRs), US-traded certificates representing its Seoul-listed stock, each worth a tenth of a common share, under SKHY. That ranks as the year's second-largest IPO after SpaceX and the largest ADR listing on record.
Lead banks BofA, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan drew cornerstone interest, a pre-pricing commitment, up to $7bn from Baillie Gifford Overseas, Coatue-managed funds and Situational Awareness Partners, per Bloomberg. Proceeds go to new chip factories in Korea and the ASML machines that print advanced chips.
What perpetuals can't do
The perpetual only tracks the stock's price; it cannot set the reference price that the Nasdaq ADR is about to become. Because it never closes, it keeps trading while Seoul and Nasdaq are shut, registering overnight and weekend news first. But that is a lead in time, not in price discovery, and its funding reads as crowded leverage rather than an information edge.
It also needs a price to track: SK Hynix already had its Seoul-listed shares, which is why the perpetual could run for weeks before the Nasdaq bell. The private AI names everyone wants next, OpenAI or Anthropic among them, offer nothing to index until they first list. It leads in time, never in price (at least while the stock's onshore liquidity dwarfs the offshore perp), and never before the first bell.
