Hyperliquid Hits Record High as $1.2 Billion Token Unlock Looms

Hyperliquid, the layer-1 blockchain and perpetual futures exchange, is on a tear—and investors in the project’s native token HYPE are reaping the benefits.

Hyperliquid, which trades as HYPE, touched an all-time high of $83.27 on Sunday before slipping to around $77.50, data from CoinGecko shows. The token’s market cap sits near $19.5 billion. That run-up, though, is about to collide with a supply release the tracking site Tokenomics.com lists as the largest of Hyperliquid’s monthly unlocks.

Every month since the November 2024 launch, Hyperliquid has freed a slice of its 1 billion-token supply on a fixed calendar. The August 29 event is the fourth in a row to send tokens to three recipient groups: community, foundation, and insiders. Insiders (the early investors) take the largest single share of this release—46.6%, against 46.3% for the community (grants, rewards, airdrops, etc.) and 7% for the Hyper Foundation.

Token unlocks don’t automatically tank a price. They raise the number of tokens that can be sold, and the new supply can pressure the market if recipients cash out. The site’s own price-impact history is mixed: After the three prior monthly unlocks, HYPE fell 7% (July), rose 1% (June), and dropped 14.1% (May) in the days that followed.

But unlocks routed to investors and early contributors are the ones traders watch—those holders paid little and have more reason to take profits than a community pool does.

Hyperliquid has been in the news for more than its token chart. Coinbase added 50x perpetual futures to its Base app through Hyperliquid’s infrastructure this month, an integration that pushes the protocol deeper into mainstream trading rails.

Perhaps the most bullish news for HYPE investors came mid-last week, when President Donald Trump directly referenced Hyperliquid during a media appearance ahead of a closed-door meeting with cryptocurrency executives. The decentralized exchange for perpetual futures is currently geofenced and unavailable to Americans, but Trump told media the CFTC is “working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion.”

The push lands as Washington signals a friendlier stance to crypto as a whole. Trump also called on Congress to pass a “fair version” of the Clarity Act at a White House crypto meeting.

With HYPE near record levels, the August 29 release drops about $560 million of insider-facing supply onto a market that’s already off its peak. The next unlock, of the same size, arrives September 29.