Hyperliquid’s RWA perps boom is eating into the revenue that backs HYPE

At the start of 2026 these builder-deployed markets were about 2% of Hyperliquid’s perp volume. They are now roughly half of it.

The pass-through shows up in the accounts. Cost of revenue, the portion of fees Hyperliquid hands straight back to builders, market makers and its own liquidity vault, was under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025. A year later it was 18%.

Builder code fees, which front-ends like Phantom charge on top for routing an order, arrived at roughly $16 million of revenue in the second quarter and left as roughly $16 million of cost in the same quarter. Every dollar of it passes through.

Traders keep showing up because of what those builder markets list. Real-world asset perps, contracts on things like crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker and pre-IPO names like SpaceX, hit a record $3.6 billion in open interest this month and overtook bitcoin as the platform’s largest market by that measure.

Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities did $25 billion in volume, 52% of the weekly total, outpacing crypto perps for the first time. The contracts settle in stablecoins, never expire, and trade through the weekend when the New York Stock Exchange is shut. A product such as leveraged Nvidia exposure, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, has few other homes.