[
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "traders are using hype to get a sense of where is the market pricing certain types of risk when they traditional places where you would trade oil or gold or silver or NASDAQ or S&P 500 are all"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "closed. It's on Hyperliquid."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Pudgy Penguins has become one of the breakout web3 brands and a CoinDesk research report examines how the project turned plush toys, collectibles, and trading cards into a customer"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "acquisition engine, generating millions in retail sales while onboarding mainstream users into its digital ecosystem. Discover how the brand is scaling towards a $120 million revenue"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "target and a potential IPO in 2027 at coindesk.com/research."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Hype has been dominating the conversation this week and my next guest published his thesis on Hyperliquid, predicting its HYPE token could search to $150 by August 2026. Arthur Hayes,"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "welcome to Markets Outlook."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Thanks for having me, Nick."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Well, thanks for coming back. Today, we are talking all about Hyperliquid and HYPE, really in the spotlight this week."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I know that you're very bullish on HYPE."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I I read your Hype Man post. I've been following you on X, but just talk to me a little bit about your Hype thesis."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "So, obviously last What was it? August, I came out with a for HYPE price improvement by 2028. And then, a few months later, I forwarded an essay that the Maelstrom team wrote about why we were selling our"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "HYPE position because of the unlocks starting in November, the team unlocks, and the increased competition from low-to-no-fee perp DEX trading platforms. And so, we sold what our whole position around in the 50-55"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "range. Obviously, HYPE corrected to a low about 20 in Jan. And then, all of a sudden, I come out and I'm bullish on Hype again and it gets released this essay. So, I think the major thing that"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "changed is obviously the team decided that they didn't want to allow themselves, it was their own decision, to sell the entire amount of monthly Hype tokens that they receive as per the tokenomics that everyone has"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "seen. There's no debate about this."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "That's the first thing. The second thing is that Hype has sort of transitioned to a level above the competition that came online from Lyra and Aster and some of these other newly created perp DEXes."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "They've been able to maybe now that they don't have the same market share as they had back in August of 2025, but they're still at, you know, close to 1 billion US dollar annualized"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "revenue run rate if you look at a 30-day period of their fees."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And what's most promising is HIP-3, the permissionless listing, has taken the world by storm, especially in these very uncertain times when on the weekends world leaders decided they need to go"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "bomb countries, markets aren't open, and now traders are using Hype to get a sense of where is the market pricing certain types of risk when the traditional places where you would trade"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "oil or gold or silver or Nasdaq or S&P 500 are all closed. It's on Hyperliquid."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And now more and more retail traders are like, well, I can trade these things 24/7 whenever I want on chain and I get, you know, 10 to 20x leverage trading these traditional products where before"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "I barely got access and even if I did get access, maybe I got two or three times leverage. And so this is why the Hyperliquid product is appealing to a retail trader who is shut out of the"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "main TradFi trading venues across the globe. You outlined your thesis there for me. What do you think it is about Hype that's making it outperform its competitors right now and giving it that"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "that oomph and that staying power?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "People are actually trading. So, the problem with a new perp DEX is how do you get activity on your platform?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "There's two ways. One, you lie about your volume. So, you create the appearance of having lots of activity on the platform by having multiple wallets engage in wash trading. The second way I"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "call we call we used to call it the volumizer. And you'd see like an exchange turn on the volumizer go, \"Oh, look at all that fake volume they're putting through to make it look like"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "there's shiny things happening on their platform.\""
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And the second thing you do is you do points programs, liquidity mining, uh token emissions, and essentially traders will engage in activity on the platform trading because they think they're going"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "to get some points or tokens on the back end. And so, they liquidity farm on the exchange. But, none of this is real liquidity because obviously volumizing doesn't actually mean that there's"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "somebody standing there willing to take your trade when you want to trade. It's just um it's fake volume. And then the liquidity mining ends as soon as your incentives end. And so, what we wanted"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "to see was, \"Okay, well, how did Hyperliquid do when these other platforms are saying we're going to offer cheaper trading, supposedly, and all these incentives?\""
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And the metric that we look at is the average daily trading volume divided by the open interest. Because open interest requires actual capital to stay on the exchange, that is what I would consider"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "real volume. And so, the lower the ratio of the reported trading volume to the open interest, the more genuine the volume is on the platform. We can never know with certainty how much wash"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "trading is going on on a particular platform or how much trading is due purely due to points. We can only look at this metric as a guiding post. And Hyperliquid has the lowest ratio of any"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "top perp deck. So, it is the realest place to trade. And furthermore, when you want to trade big size, you actually want real traders on the other side. And so, looking at the slippage to trade"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "$100,000 orders, $10 million orders, and I think we looked at $1 million orders um on the Bitcoin US dollar perp, which is obviously the most traded perp of any of these perp decks, is Hyperliquid is"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "the most liquid platform. So, it is the cheapest place to trade objectively."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "It's the most liquid place to trade objectively and it has the realest volume objectively of any perp decks and that's why we're super excited about it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "You mentioned traders using Hyperliquid to trade things like oil for example over the week over a weekend when President Trump announced that there was war in the Middle East. We saw a lot of"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "traders take to the platform to to trade oil. Was that something that was surprising to you?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "No, it's a validation of the let's have everything have a perp."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Whether it's a crypto thing or it's a non-crypto thing. And this has been a dream for perp decks is you know, for many, many years."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Hyperliquid is just the first platform to actually execute on it and get volume and traction. And now traders are like, \"Well, why try to open an Interactive Brokers account and go through all that nonsense"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "of account opening assuming I can even get one."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Let me just get my, you know, EVM wallet or MetaMask, connect to Hyperliquid, and I can trade whatever I want whatever I want as long as I have stables or Bitcoin or whatever it is the the funding currency is of"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "these pairs. And so, now traders are like, \"Well, this is super easy and it's liquid now.\" These things are trading hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars a day of"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "average daily trading volume. It's more than enough for retail trader who needs 20x leverage on something highly volatile like oil over particular weekend."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "You're obviously invested in in hype."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "We've we've heard your thesis. We've heard of why you're bullish about it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "What what are you watching out for? What are what are some of those watch outs that you might see happen and say, \"Hmm, I want to exit this position.\""
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Uh I want to see the price-equity ratio price-earnings ratio rise a lot."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And I want to see a lot of sort of hype around hype if you want to call it that. Right now, people are still like, \"Oh, it was down 50%. Oh, it's a bear market.\" There's a lot of reason why you"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "don't want to be involved in the Hyperliquid trade. And it's still it's outperforming Bitcoin in these pretty choppy times."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "I want to see everyone super bullish on hype. We're not there yet. So, I don't think this is a um a well-held opinion."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And then we're going to see what the competition does, right? Because obviously this is a very lucrative field. I think I saw some metric that hype has something like 70% of all revenue from perp decks is goes"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "to hype. Let's see if they can continue that uh that that dominance."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "In your post that we talked about just a few minutes ago, you compared Hyperliquid to GMX in 2023. Talk to me about the comparison. What can we learn um about Hyperliquid when we compare it to"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "how GMX performed back in '23?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "So, GMX was the largest trading um perp decks back then."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Again, the thing that we look for, real revenue spent by real users, and that revenue goes back to the token holders."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "That was what GMX did."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And people like, \"Oh, perp decks, we've got a new winner. This is a thing that we're structurally long because we believe in in trading. And we know it actually makes money versus a lot of"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "other protocols which are purely a narrative and a future promise of some sort of revenue. The exchanges always make revenue. And especially when we go back to fundamentals during bear"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "markets, we're looking for quality shitcoins, the exchange tokens always outperform. And that's what I was showing with GMX cuz back in sort of the doldrums of the post-FTX bear market,"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "what outperformed? GMX did very, very well."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "All right. So, $150 per token by August 2026 is your prediction. What needs to happen for us to get there?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "I think we need to return to an annualized revenue run rate of about 1.4 billion. That's where Hyperliquid was back in August of 2026."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And they need to continue to emit, you know, very, very little of their team allocation. And so right now they're doing about 1% of what they're allowed to claim is what they're actually sort"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "of vesting to themselves. If they continue that policy, I think people are going to start believing that Hyperliquid has overcome the low to no fee trading platforms and the team has taken a very pro um holder"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "stance of hype by not dumping all their tokens on everybody. And that will let people say, \"Oh, the future is going to be very bright for hype.\" And instead of trading at a 12 PE ratio, it gets up"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "near, you know, 30. What other tokens are you watching right now?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Zcash. So, I think the privacy narrative is only starting to speed up, especially as we start to see how easy it is for people to de-anonymize Bitcoin and other crypto transactions when you have AI"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "agents compared with big data sets, big tech, and big government. And so the privacy narrative is only going to pick up in people's minds about how do I protect my privacy on chain? I think"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "that's Zcash. Why Zcash over some of the other privacy protocols, some new, some old, like um Monero, Midnight? Why are you still bullish on Zcash? I'm bullish on Zcash because it's, you know, the Bitcoin"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "codebase made private. I'm also bullish on Zcash because some of the cryptographic enhancements they've made since 2016 when it's launched, we know that there is no longer a trusted setup."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "It's actually cryptographically proven that it is um anonymous. And as sort of the amount of shielded Zcash grows, the community is invested in making sure that this is private and so it becomes"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "even a stronger protocol. And that's why I'm super bullish on Zcash. All right, you're bullish on hype and Zcash. You know I'm not going to let you leave without giving me a Bitcoin prediction."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I always just got to throw that one in at the end. Does your Bitcoin uh I I don't think that we actually achieved the last Bitcoin prediction gave me. No, we didn't. We didn't."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "What What What was it? It was 200,000 by 200,000 dollars by the end of last year."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> 250,000. Yeah."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> 250. I always confuse it. I'm like, it's 250, it's 200, but either way, we didn't get there."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "What's your What's your prediction for this year?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "For this year, I'm going to just go with the same number, 250,000 dollar Bitcoin."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "250,000 by the end of the year. Love a Bitcoin prediction. You know, you can just throw out any number with with optimism, and we just got to see what happens."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> Exactly. All right. Arthur, thank you so much for joining the show, as always. It was a pleasure, and I look forward to seeing you at Consensus."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Thank you for having me. Pudgy Penguins has become one of the breakout Web3 brands, and a new CoinDesk research report examines how the project turned plush toys, collectibles, and trading"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "cards into a customer acquisition engine, generating millions in retail sales while onboarding mainstream users into its digital ecosystem. Discover how the brand is scaling towards a 120"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "million dollar revenue target, and a potential IPO in 2027 at coindesk.com/research."
  }
]