Is HYPE Cheap at $40? Expert Thinks the Market Is Pricing This Wrong

HYPE is trading at $39.29 today, ranked #10 globally with a market cap of $10.06 billion, up nearly 35% over the past month alone. To most people looking at that number, it looks expensive. David Schamis, CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies, thinks those people are reading it wrong.

“If you valued this the way people value Ethereum or the way people value Solana, the number is – we’re nowhere near the number that it should be at, whatever it is, $40 a token right now,” he said in a recent interview with The Rollup.

His argument is not based on sentiment.

Hyperliquid’s Numbers Make the Case

Hyperliquid produced $14 million in protocol fees last week alone, a 56% increase week on week, with March already tracking toward $53 million for the month. That puts it on pace for over $600 million in annualised fees. The platform holds over 70% of the perpetual DEX market by open interest and processed $208 billion in trading volume over the past 30 days.

These are the numbers of a protocol that has become one of the most actively used financial platforms in crypto.

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The Case for a Bigger TAM

The bull case Schamis lays out is built around three markets he believes are each being underpriced independently.

The first is perpetual futures, where Hyperliquid is actively taking share from centralised exchanges.

Schamis noted that Binance’s CZ has been visibly rattled by the competition, describing the pressure as felt by “serious people in crypto.” Hyperliquid’s volume is no longer just crypto either – only 7 of its top 30 markets by open interest are crypto pairs.

The rest are commodities and equities. When Iran-related tensions spiked earlier this month, traders moved to Hyperliquid because it never closes, with the platform’s crude oil perpetual hitting $1.7 billion in peak daily volume.

The second is real-world assets.

“Any asset that could be priced with an oracle price could be brought on Hyperliquid on-chain,” Schamis said. “That TAM is unbelievable.”

Hyperliquid’s volume surged 100x in six months, driven largely by growing RWA trader interest.

HIP-4 and the Market Nobody Is Talking About Yet

The third opportunity is HIP-4, currently live on testnet, which introduces prediction markets and options-style instruments with no leverage and no liquidations.

Schamis, with over 25 years in insurance, sees structured products and insurance as a multi-trillion dollar TAM that crypto has barely touched. Three ETF filings from Grayscale, Bitwise, and 21Shares are also pending.

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The Bear Case

Regulatory uncertainty could slow growth, and in financial services, competition always shows up. Schamis acknowledged it himself: there is no such thing as true franchise value when people simply move to the best price and the deepest liquidity.

Whether $40 is cheap or not depends entirely on which version of Hyperliquid the market is currently pricing in.