Hyperliquid’s $400M Buyback Lifts Hype Token to Record High as Binance Strikes Back

Hyperliquid is growing fast. Over $400 million in token buybacks have pushed its native token, Hype, to a fresh all-time high of $86 — but Binance is now circling, and the pressure is real.

Alice Liu, Head of Research at CoinMarketCap, laid out the situation plainly. Bitcoin’s recent wobble — it dropped to around $59,000 in June — didn’t spiral into a full collapse. By early September, Bitcoin had climbed back to $81,600, a 28% gain since mid-August. That bounce pushed the Crypto Fear & Greed Index back into Greed territory. Liu thinks Bitcoin probably won’t revisit this year’s lows, though she’s careful not to oversell the rally. Her tone is measured, not euphoric. And while Bitcoin grabbed headlines, she’s more focused on what’s happening in the perpetuals and tokenized asset markets — which is basically where Hyperliquid lives.

Not a quiet corner of the market.

Binance Grabs Half the RWA Perps Market

Binance launched tokenized real-world asset perpetuals — RWA perps — and moved fast. Per Liu, Binance captured around 50% of that market’s share almost immediately, pulling volume and liquidity away from Hyperliquid in the process. That’s a big hit. Hyperliquid had been a dominant force in perpetual futures, and now one of the world’s largest centralized exchanges is eating into its turf directly.

But it’s not a clean sweep. Hyperliquid still leads in the decentralized exchange space. DEX leadership is something, and it’s not nothing — but the centralized side of the perpetuals market is where serious volume lives, and Binance’s entry makes that space a lot harder to compete in. Liu’s read is that Hyperliquid faces mounting competition, and the platform needs to find ways to differentiate itself before the gap widens further.

The tension between centralized and decentralized exchanges isn’t new. It’s kind of been the defining fault line of crypto market structure for years. What’s different now is the speed at which major centralized platforms are expanding into products that were once DEX territory. Tokenized RWA perps are one example. The market for tokenized stocks, ETFs, and indices is also growing, and Liu sees those gaining traction as real investment vehicles — not just speculative plays. That shift could pull market interest away from traditional crypto assets toward products backed by real-world collateral.

Buybacks Drive Hype, But Revenue Risk Looms

Here’s the core of Hyperliquid’s current story: the platform takes its revenue and buys back its own token. Over $400 million worth of buybacks so far. The result? Hype is up 47.50% over the past 30 days and sitting at that all-time high of $86.

Liu’s view is that the buyback strategy is directly responsible for the token’s market performance. It’s a straightforward mechanism — reduce supply, support price, reward holders. And it’s working, at least right now.

See also: Symbiosis Recovers $1.15 Million in Bitcoin After Massive 46 Billion Token Exploit

The vulnerability is obvious, though. If revenue slows down, buybacks slow down. And if buybacks slow down, the primary engine driving Hype’s price momentum loses fuel. Liu doesn’t dismiss this risk. She’s optimistic on Hyperliquid overall, but she’s also clear that the whole model depends on keeping revenue flows strong. Binance’s market share grab in RWA perps is precisely the kind of thing that could put pressure on those flows. The interplay between trading volume, platform revenue, and token price is complex — network activity and price don’t always move together cleanly, and that makes the situation harder to read than a simple buyback story might suggest.

So Hyperliquid’s future is basically a question of whether it can hold enough market share to keep funding the machine.

AI Tokens Get a Cold Shoulder

Liu isn’t buying the AI-crypto hype. Not most of it, anyway.

Her warning is direct: AI tokens without real-world utility face heavy competition from established AI stocks and companies, and some of them will probably decline sharply. The narrative around AI in crypto has run well ahead of actual product development in many cases, and she thinks that gap catches up eventually.

She does carve out space for solid AI infrastructure projects — ones with genuine utility potential. But even those, she says, will likely come at discounted prices. The market will sort them out, and the bar for what counts as “real” AI utility is probably higher than a lot of token projects are prepared to meet.

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It’s a cautious take in a space that loves enthusiasm. But it’s probably the right one.

Liu’s broader point on Bitcoin is similar — she sees underestimated investment potential in the current economic climate, but she’s more conservative than some of the more bullish voices in the industry. She didn’t name names. The gap between her read and the loudest optimists in the room is notable.

Hyperliquid’s Hype token sits at $86, buybacks are running, and Binance has 50% of the RWA perps market.