🐳 Weekly Edition: CT Darling Hyperliquid Hits New ATH on Synthetic SPCX Debut

Hyperliquid continues to dominate the conversation among traders as against all odds it managed to reach a new ATH of $62 this week, now up over 120% YTD. For context of how big the exchange has grown, this now places HYPE at a higher FDV than that of Solana! I don’t want an army of HYPE bulls in my replies so I won’t push too hard, but it does seem that the valuation horse might be getting in front of the proverbial wagon here - regardless, I respect the pump and the ecosystem the team has built out.

The biggest reason we’ve seen Hyperliquid’s price continue to appreciate through the altcoin bloodbath, in my opinion at least, is that it’s become the de facto home to trade tokenized pre-IPO stocks like SpaceX and commodities like crude oil. So far they’ve been able to offer this in a sort of legal grey area by geoblocking US-based users (Hyperliquid offers the platform for third party providers to list their tokenized and synthetic equities, they don’t issue themselves) and avoiding KYC by saying they’re decentralized.

As anyone who has been on the internet for more than a few years knows however, these geoblocks are quite easy to get around. Everyone pretends like Americans aren’t on the app when many of its loudest voices are Tweeting from NYC. To be clear I think it’s ridiculous that we have to do this whole charade and we should be free to use the financial products we wish, but the rules are what they are.

A major update from the regulatory side came today by way of a delay over the decision to allow synthetic and tokenized stocks to be traded by US-based users. The delay comes over purported concerns from stock exchanges (the same ones competing with Hyperliquid’s new product line) so it’s worth taking it with a grain of salt, but it’s also worth knowing that there is still real regulatory overhead here.

For the sake of our industry, I hope during this administration we can clear up all this regulatory minutiae that has held us back for so long, as who knows what the blowback looks like when we get a changing of the guard.

On this Bitcoin Pizza Day we remember the poor soul who once spent 10,000 Bitcoin (now worth over $750M) on two Papa John’s pizzas!

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