Hyperliquid generated $419.3 million in gross fees during the first half of 2026, up from $320 million over the same stretch last year. Average daily active users rose 90% year over year, and the platform’s token has gained nearly 50% in August alone as the broader crypto market rallied.
The growth has pushed Hyperliquid further ahead of its rivals in decentralized derivatives. The platform now executes close to 44% of all on-chain perpetual futures volume and leads fee market share across trading platforms broadly at roughly 43% — figures that put it well ahead of the next-largest on-chain venues.
The headline fee number obscures a more complicated picture underneath, however. Core protocol revenue — the fees Hyperliquid itself actually keeps — slipped from $317.5 million to $305.3 million over the same period, even as total gross fees rose. The gap comes down to HIP-3, short for Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3, a framework that lets outside businesses launch their own markets on Hyperliquid’s infrastructure while keeping half of the trading fees those markets generate.
HIP-3 Is Redistributing the Pie
In practice, that means Hyperliquid’s total ecosystem is growing faster than its own take of it. Third-party operators are increasingly building commodities and equities markets on top of Hyperliquid’s base layer, a structural shift that trades some of the protocol’s direct revenue for a broader, more diversified set of products running on its rails — a bet that a bigger overall pie is worth a smaller individual slice.
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Riding a Broader Market Wave
Hyperliquid’s August surge didn’t happen in isolation. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperliquid all pushed into overbought territory this month on the back of the same Treasury-driven rally that has lifted crypto markets broadly, giving the platform's usual growth trend an extra tailwind from the wider market's risk appetite.
Whether Hyperliquid can hold its market-share lead as HIP-3 hands more of its infrastructure over to third-party operators will be the more interesting question once the current rally cools.
