Hyperliquid's real-world asset perpetual futures markets have become the platform's largest category by open interest, marking a shift in on-chain derivatives. Tokenized stocks and commodities recorded $3.6 billion in open interest this month, exceeding Bitcoin perps for the first time.
Between July 13 and July 19, RWA perps generated $25 billion in trading volume, comprising 52 percent of Hyperliquid's weekly total. That growth follows a five-month run where equity and commodity perps climbed from roughly 1 percent to 38 percent of overall platform volume.
The expansion traces to Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3 (HIP-3), implemented in October 2025. The proposal allows users who stake 500,000 HYPE tokens—valued at approximately $28 million—to deploy their own perpetual futures markets and retain up to half of the generated trading fees.
Builder-deployed markets accounted for only 2 percent of Hyperliquid's perp volume at the start of 2026. They now represent roughly half of all perpetual futures activity on the platform.
Hyperliquid routes approximately 97 percent of net protocol trading fees—after the increased share distributed to builders and market makers—into its Assistance Fund. That fund continuously buys HYPE tokens on the open market and retires them, with roughly 44.5 million HYPE removed from circulation to date. The RWA market expansion has boosted trading activity while narrowing the net revenue base feeding those buybacks, a direct consequence of the fee-sharing model with builders.
Despite record trading activity, Hyperliquid's gross protocol revenue has declined. It peaked at $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 and fell to $202 million by the second quarter of 2026, a 43 percent drop. This occurred even as total open interest climbed to over $11 billion on July 13, the highest level of 2026.
The cost of revenue—fees passed to builders, market makers and the liquidity vault—rose from under 6 percent of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025 to 18 percent a year later. Builder code fees, such as those charged by front-ends like Phantom, accounted for $16 million in both revenue and cost during the second quarter, indicating a full pass-through.
Hyperliquid now settles approximately 9 percent of all open perpetual positions globally, including those on centralized exchanges, up from under 7 percent in late May.
RWA perp growth is heavily concentrated: Trade.xyz is responsible for more than 90 percent of all HIP-3 open interest. That reliance on a single deployer introduces specific risks, including dependence on its oracle choices, margin settings and risk management practices.
An incident earlier this week illustrated that concentration risk. A single trade on a thinly traded Korean pre-market venue caused Trade.xyz's SK Hynix contract to drop 19 percent, triggering liquidations. Trade.xyz has since agreed to reimburse affected users.
HIP-4 extends the builder model to sports and macro outcome markets. Fees from those markets will also flow into the Assistance Fund's HYPE buyback mechanism, further diversifying the token's revenue base.
