Hyperliquid’s HYPE Hits a Record Above $90

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token set a new all-time high of $90.92 on Friday, then pushed toward $92 on a gain of roughly 11% over twenty-four hours. The move came right after the exchange switched on stablecoin borrowing backed by HYPE and bitcoin. Two days earlier, Payward had said it wants to bring Hyperliquid perpetual markets to its US clients.

Key Takeaways

• HYPE hit $90.92, then traded near $92 on Friday.
• Users can now borrow USDC and USDT against HYPE and BTC, with $269M borrowed on day one.
• Payward is preparing regulated onchain perpetuals for US clients, starting on Hyperliquid.

HYPE Clears $90 Ten Days After Its Last Peak

HYPE printed a fresh all-time high of $90.92 on Friday, shortly after the borrowing launch was announced. During Asian morning hours the token was up more than 11% and edging toward $92, the strongest move among the large caps that day. It later drifted back to around $89 by the end of the US session.

The previous record was set on September 8, at $88. At that point the token’s market cap was approaching $20B, after a rise of more than 50% in a single month. For perspective, back in early June HYPE was celebrating a new high just above $60.

Activity on the exchange has recovered alongside the price. On September 8, open interest reached $14.3B, almost back to where it stood before the crash of October 10, 2025. That day, open interest fell from $14.7B to $6.5B, a drop of about 56% in a single session. Eleven months later, that hole has been almost fully refilled.

Two drivers have fed the climb since mid-August, both pointing to a wider audience for the exchange. Coinbase began routing users of its Base App to Hyperliquid, and Donald Trump backed a US entry for the exchange, pointing to CFTC work on compliant onshore access.

Hyperliquid Opens Stablecoin Borrowing Against HYPE and BTC

The new piece this week is a feature users had been waiting on. Holders can now post HYPE or BTC as collateral and borrow stablecoins against it, either USDC or USDT. Until now, those tokens mostly sat in trading accounts or wallets, even as fresh supply keeps reaching the market, as it did with the $817M HYPE unlock that landed on Fed day in late July.

The feature runs on HyperCore, the same infrastructure that already powers the exchange’s portfolio margin system. Every borrowed asset comes from a lender who supplied it, rather than being created through platform-level margin accounting. In plain terms, credit on the exchange is backed by real deposits, not by internal bookkeeping.

Uptake was quick. By Friday, the exchange reported $269M in assets borrowed across the underlying infrastructure. For a HYPE holder, the appeal is straightforward: raise digital dollars without selling the tokens, and so without giving up any further upside.

The timing helped. The launch landed on the same day the CFTC sent its crypto market rulemaking to the White House for review and the SEC released its exemption for tokenized stock trading. The whole market was moving higher, with Bitcoin back above $81,000 and Solana up more than 12%.

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US Access, Buybacks and Unlocks: What Moves HYPE Next

The heavier signal came on Wednesday. In its September 16 announcement, Payward, the parent company of the Kraken crypto exchange, said it intends to offer US clients onchain perpetual futures, starting with Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 markets.

HIP-3 lets a third party create, own and run permissioned perpetual markets on the protocol’s onchain order book. Matching and public recording stay on the Hyperliquid chain, while regulatory duties, customer onboarding and clearing remain with the licensed US entities. Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Payward, framed it in the same release as rails that “serve clients in more than 190 countries and territories”.

The structure is fully regulated on the US side. Bitnomial Exchange, a CFTC-designated contract market, would design and administer the contracts, and Bitnomial Clearinghouse would clear and settle them. NinjaTrader Clearing would hold client accounts, and only customers on both firms’ allowlists could take part. It is the first time a registered US exchange or clearinghouse has deployed perpetual futures on Hyperliquid.

The stakes show up in the volumes. Perpetual futures generated more than $85T in notional volume worldwide in 2025, and Hyperliquid processed more than $200B over its latest thirty days. Opening that market to US clients would widen the pool of potential traders considerably.

Buybacks add support too. About 97% of fees from the exchange’s core crypto perpetuals go into buying back HYPE, while HIP-3 builders keep up to half of their trading fees. Between March and August, HIP-3 markets had driven the recovery, their share of open interest climbing from 18% to 34%. That share then fell back to 25% in a single month, which tilts more fees toward buybacks. That balance can shift quickly, as the summer showed when Hyperliquid revenue fell 43% from its peak.

In the short run, HYPE trades with no prior peak above it to act as a reference, carried by a crypto market that is rallying again. The pace of borrowing and the level of open interest will show whether the momentum holds, and circulating supply, which grows with each token unlock, remains the point to watch.

Further out, everything hinges on US clients actually arriving. Payward’s plan is still a stated intention with its own regulatory steps ahead, and the CFTC proposal has not been published. If both go through, Hyperliquid gains a regulated doorway to American traders.

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