Morning Minute: HYPE Soars to ATH as SPCX Takes Off

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our new daily news show covering all of the top stories in 5 minutes, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors continue rally with HYPE leading the way; BTC at $66.4k
• HYPE hits new ATH at $76.50 after SPCX sees after-market price discovery and $1.1B in volume
• Ventuals shuts down shop on Hyperliquid, removes Anthropic and OpenAI perps
• Saylor buys another $100M in BTC, raises another $100M in cash in 2nd week of 50/50 deployment
• CEX volumes hit 2-year low as DEX and Perps volumes rise

🚀 HYPE Hits a Record High as SpaceX Volume Pours Into Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token hit a new all-time high of $76.50 overnight, up 12% on the day.

The driver seems to be SpaceX. With Nasdaq closed, the after-hours price discovery for the year’s biggest IPO has been running on Hyperliquid’s 24/7 SPCX perp, which did about $1.1 billion in volume and climbed roughly 23% to around $209 (soaring as high as $230 last night). That made the tokenized SpaceX contract the third-biggest market on the entire platform, behind only Bitcoin and Ether, and ahead of Solana and even HYPE’s own book.

HYPE’s demand isn’t only onchain. HYPE ETFs traded roughly $17 million, their second-biggest day on record, a sign TradFi is reaching for exposure too. As pre-IPO and real-world-asset perps pull activity onchain, Hyperliquid is the venue scooping it up, and HYPE is the cleanest way to own that flow. And the market is realizing it and re-rating HYPE in real time…

₿ Strategy Buys More Bitcoin and Pads Its Cash Reserve

Strategy bought another 1,587 BTC for about $100 million last week, at an average of $63,024. At the same time, it grew its USD Reserve by $100 million to $1.1 billion, the second straight week it has rebuilt that cash cushion. Both moves were funded by selling roughly $209 million of MSTR stock through its at-the-market program.

This is the 2nd week in a notable shift in execution. The reserve is the pile Saylor set aside to cover dividends on Strategy’s preferred shares and interest on its debt (~$1.7B coming due over the next 12 months), and he is rebuilding it after the company unexpectedly used $900M to pay off 2029 convertible debt last month. JPMorgan flagged that the reserve covered only about six months of dividends and said Strategy needed to restore it to reassure investors. So Saylor is now doing both at once, stacking Bitcoin and stacking dollars, and he’s doing it by selling MSTR shares with his ATM program. And MSTR shareholders don’t seem to mind, with the stock up 6% on Monday.

Zooming out a bit, Saylor’s old playbook was simple—raise capital and buy Bitcoin. The new one is more defensive, threading the needle of buying Bitcoin while also raising cash stockpiles to manage ever-increasing debt payments. The good news is—he continues to be very good at raising capital. The bad news—the debt is likely to only increase over time and as he sells more STRC (his shiny new lever to buy more BTC). It will be a delicate balance for the foreseeable future. But to Saylor’s credit, he’s managing the balance well so far, and these recent cash raises should calm the market’s recent concerns over his recent actions (selling the BTC, paying off the 2029 debt). Perhaps this latest round of Saylor fud will mark the bottom once again…

🤖 Hyperliquid Loses Its Anthropic and OpenAI Markets as Ventuals Shuts Down

Ventuals, one of the teams that built real-world asset perpetuals on Hyperliquid, is shutting down its markets and folding into another project in the ecosystem.

That ends the OpenAI and Anthropic perps it ran, which let traders bet on the valuations of the two biggest private AI companies. The contracts have been halted and settled on Hyperliquid.

Now, Ventuals is consolidating into another team and not just giving up, so perhaps there is a future here. Or perhaps TradeXYZ (the marketshare leader for RWA perps on Hyperliquid) will stand these markets up. If not, this may be a real dent in Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO pitch.

But with SPCX doing billions in volume and catching national (even global) attention on Hyperliquid, imagine they’ll find a solution to stand these pre-IPO markets back up in short order.

📉 Exchange Volumes Hit a Multi-Year Low as RWA Perps Set a Record

Combined crypto exchange volume (CEX volume) fell 3.45% in May to $4.41 trillion, the lowest since September 2024 and the fourth straight monthly decline, according to CoinDesk Data.

Spot volumes took the hardest hit, sliding to $963 billion, the weakest month since October 2023. The downtrend tracks the broader crypto drawdown and the reality that AI stocks have been eating crypto’s attention. But there are other factors at play.

Real-world asset perpetuals, the contracts tied to tokenized stocks and private companies (i.e. SpaceX pre-IPO), jumped 10.4% to a record $211 billion, and DEX futures rose for the first time in seven months. So even as traders abandoned spot, RWA perps and DEX volume went up. Capital is still here, it’s just trading differently than it did.

As for the crypto impact, there are several. For one, interest in RWAs and stocks takes away from crypto token interest. We see that clearly in the price action and volumes. The good news is, with that capital onchain, it’s an easy rotation if and when the crypto trade heats back up. Another big impact factor is the exodus from spot trading to perps and what that means for how tokens trade. It was evident in the ZEC exploit and 60% crash just 2 weeks ago. When ZEC went down, so did several other recent alt movers that were not directly correlated. But they were correlated in that they were being longed on Hyperliquid by a cohort of traders who had just lost capital on the ZEC trade, and thus those traders had to do more broad derisking. This means we very well may see more group moves up and down in “hot alts” and other consensus trades. There are several other impacts as well, likely to play out over time. Certainly a situation worth monitoring…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are green again with HYPE leading the way; BTC even at $66.4k; ETH +2% at $1,796; SOL +3% at $74.50; HYPE +11% at $75.10
• JTO (+33%), XLM (+12%), UNI (+12%) and AERO (+13%) led top movers; WLD +6% as well
• Oil -3% at $78; Gold even at $4,368
• Stock futures are flat after a huge Monday, though SPCX is up 10% premarket
• HYPE jumped 12% overnight to a new ATH of $76.50 on the back of SPCX doing $1B+ in daily volume and seeing price discovery last night
• Standard Chartered initiated coverage on Uniswap with a $100 UNI target by 2030, implying roughly 40x upside, betting the DEX sits at the center of Wall Street’s move onchain
• Kraken rolled out crypto perp futures for US traders, bringing a product long restricted to offshore platforms onshore for American customers
• Crypto users pledged $560 million for tokenized SpaceX shares but got no allocation, after the platform behind the offering couldn’t secure the underlying stock.

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mixed; DOGE -2%, SHIB -1%, PEPE +1%, PENGU +2%, TRUMP -4%, BONK -1%, SPX +10%, FARTCOIN +4%
• Merlin (+100%), SPCX69 (+54%), and NEST (+32%) led movers on Solana
• Base movers included Velvet (+17%), SUP (+30%) and Ski (+10%)

📈 Myriad Market of the Day

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mixed with ETH jumping 10%; Punks -2% at 32.7 ETH, BAYC +1% at 9.18 ETH, Pudgy +1% at 4.75 ETH; Hypurr’s -3% at 265 HYPE
• Metavixens (+50%) and Axie (+33%) led top movers
• Pudgy Penguins shut down Pudgy Party, its mobile battle royale game, less than a year after launch, with the team redirecting focus to its Pudgy World experience