Hyperliquid OI Tops $11B for First Time in 2026 as RWA, Perps Trading Drive Recovery

OI – which measures the total amount of money sitting in active, unsettled derivatives contracts (like futures or options) – later retraced to around $10.9bn.

The year-to-date record is significant as it shows that Hyperliquid is recovering from OI lost in the crash of the cryptocurrency market in October 2025 and that its prospects are no longer as tightly intertwined with the price of crypto.  

October 2025 crypto crash fallout

On 6 Oct, 2025, with Bitcoin (BTC) at an all-time high of more than $126k, OI on Hyperliquid was right there with it, reaching a record $15bn. When the price of BTC crashed on 10 Oct, 2025, Hyperliquid's OI also fell, dropping to $6.2bn by 11 Oct, 2025. 

Now, even though the price of BTC remains at less than half its all-time high (about $61,000 as of 13 Jul), Hyperliquid has regained more than half its lost OI, thanks to a pair of new drivers: the growing adoption of the tokenization of RWAs and the trading of decentralized perpetual futures.

Hyperliquid said in a post on X that OI in its real-world asset (RWA) markets reached a record $3.6bn, with a large amount of that on its HIP3 platform, introduced in October 2025. 

HIP-3 is Hyperliquid's permissionless framework used to launch new perpetual markets. According to DeFiLlama, OI on HIP-3 markets reached a record $3.7bn on 13 Jul. 

HYPE, Hyperliquid's native token, traded at $63 as of 16:39 UTC on 13 Jul, up around 150% since the start of the year, according to CoinGecko. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid has about $6bn in total value locked (TVL) and generates more than $1bn in annualized trading fees, according to DeFiLlama.

HIP-3 launched with the mission of making the perpetual futures listing process fully permissionless, allowing anyone who stakes HYPE tokens to launch their own markets. 

The following month, Hyperliquid introduced a "Growth Mode" upgrade that cut trading fees for new HIP-3 markets by at least 90% to encourage adoption.

Less than a year later, the builder ecosystem now accounts for about one-third of the broader Hyperliquid platform's total OI, according to DeFiLlama.

TradeXYZ, a decentralized trading platform built on the Hyperliquid blockchain, accounted for about 99% of HIP-3 trading volume over the past 24 hours. Meanwhile, cumulative trading volume on the platform has surpassed $330bn, according to DeFiLlama.

Because Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets include perpetual futures tied to tokenized assets, such as stocks, commodities and pre-IPO companies, its growth comes as the broader RWA market continues to grow.

The value of tokenized RWAs has climbed to $34.2bn, up around 58% from $21.7bn at the start of the year, and nearly 4% over the past month alone, according to RWA.xyz.

In addition to RWA and tokenization, the rebound in Hyperliquid's OI also comes as decentralized perpetual futures trading continues to gain traction. Perpetual DEXs have processed around $15tn in cumulative trading volume, according to DeFiLlama.

Over the past 30 days, decentralized perpetual exchanges processed about $527.7bn in trading volume. Hyperliquid leads the sector with $189.3bn in monthly volume, ahead of Aster at $45.8bn and Lighter at $37.6bn.

Aster is a decentralized derivatives exchange backed by YZi Labs that also offers spot trading and tokenized stocks. Lighter is a perpetual futures exchange built on the Ethereum blockchain with a focus on high-speed trading.