3 Forecasts for the HYPE Cryptocurrency: Pessimistic, Realistic, and Optimistic

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The core of the current issue with HYPE is the token unlock. Team members and investors, who were locked out from selling their tokens for a year, are gaining access to them starting in December – receiving 10 million HYPE monthly over a period of 2 years.

This is putting significant downward pressure on the price! The market is anticipating monthly sell-offs of $85+ million, which has already driven the price down from $60 to $33.

The counterbalance is a buyback program, where the platform is spending $80-110 million per month to purchase tokens, potentially offsetting the selling pressure.

Next, we will move to the global and long-term forecast.

Hyperliquid (HYPE) - a potential new cycle leader (like Ethereum and Solana in the past). Let's draw a historical analogy with previous market cycles, where a new major successful project emerged each time:

• 2017 cycle – explosive growth of Ethereum
• 2021 cycle – growth of Solana
• Next cycle (post-2025) - Hyperliquid (or another leader among DEXs).

In its first cycle, Hyperliquid is already the undisputed leader in its segment with a market share of approximately 80% of DEX trading.

Below you will find 3 forecasts for the HYPE cryptocurrency:

1. Pessimistic
2. Realistic
3. And Optimistic

To recap, Hyperliquid is a high-speed decentralized exchange (DEX) on its own L1 blockchain with up to 200,000 transactions/sec, zero gas fees, and a classic order book (like on centralized exchanges).

The essence of the growth is that Hyperliquid earns not only from trading fees as an exchange but also from trader losses through liquidity pools. You can supply capital to liquidity pools and earn from fees and trader losses. In the long run, the liquidity provider always wins. More details in the guide about the Hyperliquid exchange.

Growth Context and Numbers

Hyperliquid has become one of the most popular and successful new tokens. This is because Hyperliquid is both its own blockchain (Layer 1) and a leading leveraged exchange.

Let's look at some numbers for clarity. Hyperliquid grew from $57 million TVL and $2.3 billion in volume to over $80 billion in volume with peaks exceeding $100 billion and TVL over $4.5 billion - colossal growth. More precisely, growth of approximately 7,960%.

Data sourced from DefiLlama. And here is a guide on how to be the first to find promising DeFi projects on DefiLlama.

The next growth factor is the industry shift towards decentralized exchanges. Traders are moving to DEXs due to the absence of intermediaries and verification processes, which have become a nuisance on centralized exchanges.

The result is that Hyperliquid is both the cause and the beneficiary of this trend. The share of DeFi derivative trading has grown from less than 3% to over 20%, whereas previously, even in a bull market, it hovered around 1-4%.

And although it's still far from Binance's metrics, we are observing Hyperliquid gradually eating into the centralized monopolist's market share.

Source: The Block.

Hyperliquid also leads among perpetual contract exchanges, surpassing DEXs like Jupiter, Aster, and edgeX.

Financial Results

As a result of its operations, Hyperliquid earns huge amounts of money. In a typical month, Hyperliquid earned $114 million.

This revenue is distributed among HYPE token holders via buybacks.

As you can see, significant funds are flowing into the system and are actually being used to buy back HYPE tokens, which excludes speculative trading nature.

However, before making forecasts, one should also consider the competition from Aster, which is supported by Binance.

Competitors and the Relationship Between Aster and Binance

Binance, as the leading centralized exchange, has noted the growing market share of Hyperliquid and decentralized exchanges in general. As a result, Binance supports the decentralized exchange Aster, whose trading volume has grown from hundreds of millions to over $70 billion per day.

The situation with Aster is complicated: technically, it's not Binance, but the ties are very close – Binance's founder (CZ) actively promotes the platform on social media and confirms the participation of former Binance employees.

Aster quickly reached the top spot in trading volume (over 40% market share), surpassing Hyperliquid, but lags in open interest ($1.67 billion vs. Hyperliquid's $12.8 billion).

Other competitors Lighter and edgeX have grown to $1 billion, but their volumes are often inflated through airdrop farming. To assess Aster's real sustainability, we need to see if it can maintain its dominance and grow its open interest to Hyperliquid's level.

Compared to other DEXs (Uniswap, PancakeSwap), Hyperliquid offers full-fledged trading with a real order book, charts, futures, stop orders, and strategies, not just token swaps.

Growth Prospects

Now let's consider Hyperliquid's prospects.

1. The token is difficult to buy, especially for US institutional investors, as it's not listed on major centralized exchanges (Binance, Coinbase). This creates scarcity and growth potential.
2. Hyperliquid has a technology that allows wallets (e.g., MetaMask, Phantom) to integrate perpetual futures trading and earn revenue.
3. Innovation: any developer can launch their own perpetual markets on any assets (stocks, real estate, pre-IPO) using Hyperliquid's infrastructure, opening access to trillion-dollar markets.
4. The main bullish argument is the token economics:

• The protocol spends 100% of its profits (tens of $ millions per month) on buying back and burning HYPE, making the token deflationary.
• At the current rate, the entire coin supply will be bought back in less than 5 years.
• HYPE emission is predictable and transparent, with no hidden inflationary pressures.

The conclusion is: with organic growth in trading volume, HYPE could replicate BNB's success with growth potential up to $300 per token (a more than 12x increase in market capitalization).

Forecasts

So, now let's move on to price forecasts. As always, we will present pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic target levels for HYPE. Please note one important point: despite its youth, the project immediately started with a billion-dollar valuation, so this is not your hundredx low-cap altcoin.

Pessimistic

For the pessimistic scenario, let's assume the price could reach around $50. This might disappoint some, as the growth would be about 25%, but it would leave the market capitalization at around $16 billion, which is still quite good.

Realistic

For the realistic scenario, we target approximately 2x growth, setting a target around $85, corresponding to a market capitalization of about $28 billion. Remember, we are in the late stage of the market cycle, and this is not a low-cap asset.

Optimistic

For the optimistic scenario, we set a target of $120, to enter a new price zone and reach a market capitalization of $39 billion.

We acknowledge this is an ambitious goal, especially at the current stage of the cycle, but it is definitely possible if the project maintains its relevance. If they manage to establish themselves as a leading DEX, then this scenario is also likely.

Risks

The main risk to watch is whether competitors Aster, Lighter, edgeX, and others can grow while simultaneously taking real liquidity away from Hyperliquid. If we see open interest starting to decline as competitors grow, it will mean that competitors are taking users and liquidity from Hyperliquid.

So far, looking at the charts, there are no serious signs of such outflows.

Moreover, Hyperliquid controls about 80% of the decentralized perpetual futures market.

This is an incredible achievement, and at its peak, the platform processed $30 billion in daily trading volume. This demonstrates its rapid growth in just one year!

Summary and Competition from Aster

To summarize: Hyperliquid is possibly one of the fastest-growing startups in the entire history of crypto, especially considering they have only 11 employees.

All other market players see this and say:

- Hey, we want a piece of that pie too!

Some players in the perpetual futures market see a threat in Hyperliquid to their business model, especially Binance with its promotion of the Aster exchange. Binance's goal is not to profit from Aster, but to "debunk the hype" of Hyperliquid, which is taking its market share and aspiring to be an exchange token. Binance is the only major stakeholder in Aster; it's not in their interest to dump the tokens because this is a strategic game.

Hyperliquid is a strong project with real cash flows, a token buyback program, and innovative technologies like HIP-3, which open access to new markets.

HIP-3 allows anyone to create their own trading pairs with perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid base. It's like renting trading space: you post collateral (staking) to open your own "store" - an exchange.

Perpetual futures markets from Hyperliquid's own decentralized exchange are already available to users in supported regions directly in the Phantom wallet via Phantom Perps.

However, in this cycle, one should not expect super-high returns (1000x), as the token appeared relatively late in the cycle and already has a high market capitalization.

The main opportunity lies in the next cycle. We expect that after the market peak at the end of 2025 and the subsequent bear market (possibly bottoming in late 2026 - 2027), Hyperliquid could show growth of 30-50 times from its lows, similar to how Solana grew from $12-13 in 2022.

Disclaimer: All information provided in this article should not be taken as financial advice! The article was created for educational purposes.