Why Bitwise CIO Thinks Investors Are Mispricing Hyperliquid and HYPE Token

Despite not being available to US users, Hougan calls Hyperliquid one of the fastest-growing financial businesses he has seen.

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan described Hyperliquid as one of the most important crypto projects to emerge in recent years.

He believes that investors continue to underestimate both the platform’s long-term impact and the valuation of its native HYPE token.

Growth Trajectory

In a recent memo, Hougan said Hyperliquid has evolved beyond a crypto perpetual futures exchange into a financial “super-app” offering exposure to multiple asset classes, including commodities, S&P 500 futures, pre-IPO stocks, and prediction markets. According to Hougan, the platform’s growth has been driven in part by the regulatory environment emerging under SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, whose November 2025 remarks supported the development of multi-asset trading platforms operating outside conventional SEC structures.

The Bitwise exec noted that Hyperliquid now derives nearly half of its trading volume from non-crypto assets and claimed the figure could rise to 70% by year-end. Despite the platform remaining unavailable to US users, he described it as “one of the fastest-growing financial businesses” he has seen, while citing approximately $170 billion in monthly trading volume.

Hougan also stated that Hyperliquid represents a “Gen 2” token designed from Day 1 to accrue value, as he highlighted the platform’s reported policy of directing 99% of trading fees toward buying back HYPE tokens. This is very different from tokens launched during former chair Gary Gensler’s tenure. Hougan explained that those “governance tokens” that had little or no economic tie to the underlying blockchain or application, as they sought to remove any expectation of profit.

“In the future, I suspect this will be the norm for token design. In the meantime, it’s one of the reasons Hyperliquid is the best-performing large-cap crypto asset in the world over the past year.”

Hougan further claimed HYPE is currently one of the most mispriced assets in crypto due to category as well as anchoring error.

Institutional Momentum

His comments come days after 21Shares rolled out the first US spot ETF tracking Hyperliquid’s token under the THYP ticker. Bitwise followed suit with another exchange-traded fund tracking HYPE, under the ticker BHYP on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).