From November to early December 2024, with the rise of the altcoin market, decentralized trading platforms welcomed a new round of development opportunities. Binance has successively launched several DEX native tokens, including COW, AERO, and VELO, and these tokens have all performed very well in trading. Users are becoming increasingly accustomed to trading on DEX platforms. Market hotspots are also rapidly rotating: as the hype of meme tokens in the Solana ecosystem cools, trading activity is beginning to shift to the Base chain and BSC chain. The rising star Hyperliquid has siphoned off on-chain funds from Solana, with its total locked value (TVL) surging 14 times in just one week, breaking through 2.8 billion dollars, and jumping to eighth place among all Layer 1 public chains.
1. Overview of the Hyperliquid Project
Project Background: Hyperliquid is an innovative Layer 1 blockchain that utilizes the HyperBFY consensus algorithm, aiming to achieve high throughput and low-cost transactions, with block delays of less than one second, designed for DeFi applications. With its native token HYPE and a fully on-chain decentralized exchange, Hyperliquid provides a platform focused on order book perpetual futures, offering significant profit opportunities. At the same time, Hyperliquid also offers an auction mechanism to provide opportunities for new tokens to be listed.
Industry Background: Although the project has not publicly disclosed detailed team backgrounds and financing information, based on its significant scale of fund inflows and professional quantitative trading systems, the market rumors regarding the founding team's Wall Street quantitative trading background appear to have some credibility.
Competitors: Hyperliquid's core business focuses on order book perpetual futures trading, competing with platforms like Uniswap and Jupiter in the DEX space, while also challenging traditional centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. This strategic positioning reflects the growing market demand for trading transparency and security. Although several projects have attempted to establish decentralized trading platforms in the perpetual contract field, CEX still dominates this market. Hyperliquid, through innovative trading mechanisms and optimized user experiences, is gradually breaking this pattern, gaining significant market share in the perpetual contract market, challenging the dominance of CEX.
Ecological Data:
The ecological TVL ranks 8th among all Layer 1 blockchains, with a total locked value (TVL) of 2.466 billion dollars. Along with some cross-chain protocols, the total TVL had previously surpassed 3 billion dollars, but ecological projects are lacking.
Significant funds have flowed into Hyperliquid, with an inflow of 1.87 billion dollars in the past seven days, ranking third in fund inflows, second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum. From the perspective of total TVL of DEX, Uniswap still dominates, with a market share of 23.95%, while Hyperliquid has surpassed Raydium with a share of 8.95%.
Total TVL of Dexes: $27.6 Billion, among which
Uniswap: 6.61B (23.95%)
Hyperliquid: 2.47B (8.95%)
Raydium: 2.32B (8.41%)
In all on-chain futures trading markets, Hyperliquid ranks first in trading volume, with a trading volume of 5.95 billion dollars in the last 24 hours, and the platform's total trading volume has accumulated to 532.88 billion dollars.
2. Ecological Projects
Recently, Hyperliquid's ecological tokens have performed brilliantly, with the platform token HYPE once exceeding 29 dollars, continuously setting new historical highs; currently, three tokens have market capitalizations exceeding 100 million dollars, namely HYPE, PURR, and HFUN; and 17 tokens have market capitalizations exceeding 10 million dollars. With Hyperliquid's open and transparent token listing mechanism, along with the emergence of pump-like platforms, many tokens have sprung up, and HYPE's daily trading volume market share has decreased from about 92% to around 70%. Next, let's learn about some tokens in the Hyperliquid ecosystem.
1) PURR
PURR is the first local token on Hyperliquid that implements the HIP-1 standard, a meme coin featuring a cat. This token did not undergo an initial sale but airdropped 50% of the tokens to users based on their holding proportions, while the remaining 50% was added to the PURR/USDC liquidity pool (subsequently, upon community suggestion, 40% of the tokens were destroyed). As of December 18, the market capitalization of PURR is approximately 296 million dollars, making it the official meme token on Hyperliquid with a high consensus in the community.
2) HFUN
This project can be seen as Pump.fun on Hyperliquid, with an additional Telegram trading bot designed specifically for it. As we know, Hyperliquid's success relies on its open and transparent token listing mechanism. First, if the project team wants to launch spot trading, they need to apply for the deployment rights of the HIP-1 native token (HIP-1 is the token standard established by Hyperliquid), and then a Dutch auction mechanism will be used to determine which party will ultimately obtain the token ticker.
In response to Hyperliquid's token listing auction mechanism, Hypurr Fun has emerged, allowing participating users to invest funds and then compete for spots to list tokens on Hyperliquid. We can check Hypurr token information and trading conditions through the web version, including project introduction, token price, market capitalization, trading volume, and other basic information. Currently, trading can only be conducted through the Telegram Bot.
Website: https://app.hypurr.fun/launches
Trading Bot: https://t.me/HypurrFunBot
Currently, Hypurr Fun is still in its early stages and is continuously rising. The tools are obviously very incomplete, with a lot of room for improvement, and it cannot be compared to other mature pump-like ecosystems. Precisely because of this, there may be many Alpha opportunities.
3) FARM
FARM is the first GenAI-related AI agent game built on Hyperliquid. Through the GenAI model (Cryptokitties 2.0) + Stardew Valley (simulation game) + Pokemon GO (combat/eSports), it supports users in biological synthesis on-chain via AI.
Official website: https://www.thefarm.fun/
The current product roadmap has designed three phases, which will be launched consecutively. The first phase has already gone live on December 13, 2024, at 08:00 AM Eastern Time. Its token economic model allocates 20% to MM's super liquidity and 80% to participants of Hypurr Pump through a fair launch method. Its supply is fixed, and FARM will not be increased. Furthermore, 50% of the fees collected in FARM will be automatically burned, and 50% of the profits will be used to repurchase circulating supply and destroy it.
4) RAGE
Rage Trade is a derivatives and yield aggregation platform in the DeFi space. It was launched on Arbitrum around 2022, known for its 'Delta Neutral GLP' strategy, providing users with stable returns in volatile market conditions by integrating GLP (GMX's LP token) and corresponding hedge positions. Its core functionalities include ETH perpetual contracts with 10x leverage, cross-chain liquidity cycles, and an 80-20 vault that generates yield.
In August of this year, the RAGE public offering was completed, raising 6 million dollars in 15 minutes. According to previous news, Rage Trade released token economics, with 35% for token sales, 30% for community finances, 15% for the team, 13.5% for private buyers, and 6.5% for airdrops. Currently, the market capitalization of RAGE is about 22 million dollars.
Summary
Currently, Hyperliquid has captured the largest scale of the on-chain Perps market, with a daily trading volume reaching up to 6 billion dollars, and the market size is still growing. The platform attracts users with zero gas fees and only a 0.03% trading fee, and its trading execution speed can compete with centralized exchanges, significantly reducing the trading costs for users. However, it seems that the platform's volume and revenue situation are not transparent to outsiders, and it is temporarily unavailable for inquiry on DefiLlama; its monthly active users exceed 50,000. Although Hyperliquid performs well in terms of user activity and daily usage, its operational model is closer to that of centralized exchanges, leaving room for improvement in its decentralized characteristics. This 'CEX-like' attribute has also sparked discussions in the community about its true level of decentralization.
