Arthur Hayes backs Hyperliquid as his largest liquid shitcoin bet, targeting $150 HYPE as Bitcoin grinds near $69K in a derivatives‑driven, fragile macro regime.
Summary
- Hayes makes Hyperliquid his largest liquid shitcoin position and calls it crypto’s highest quality project by real, fee‑paying users.
- He targets $150 per HYPE by August 2026 if annualized revenues revisit $1.4 billion on modest perp market‑share gains from CEXs.
- ADV/OI metrics and Bybit’s 2026 outlook both underscore that market structure and derivatives flows now drive Bitcoin more than the classic four‑year cycle.
Bitcoin trades firmer near $69K as derivatives-driven market structure collides with a fragile macro backdrop, and Arthur Hayes makes Hyperliquid (HYPE) his “largest liquid shitcoin position.” His latest essay frames Maelstrom as “hype men that monetize attention,” arguing that in a choppy regime “the best performing shitcoins are exchanges” because they keep earning fees even when spot markets stall.
Hayes singles out perp DEX Hyperliquid, calling it “the dominant perp DEX” and “the largest revenue-generating project that isn’t a stablecoin,” with 97% of revenue used to buy back HYPE from the market. In his base case, he targets $150 per HYPE by August 2026, roughly 5x from the “current price of ~$30 at the time of writing,” contingent on 30‑day annualized revenues climbing back to about $1.4 billion and only a modest 3.97% market‑share shift from CEX perps. That thesis leans heavily on HIP‑3 permissionless listings, which in “only four months” have grown to “close to 10% of total Hyperliquid revenues,” driven by perps on silver, gold, Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500.
Under the hood, Hayes argues that what matters now is structure, not just narratives. He points to the ADV/OI ratio as the “only objective measure to rank exchanges,” concluding that “Hyperliquid’s volumes are the most real out of the top 5 perp DEXs because its ADV/OI ratio is the lowest.” That view echoes broader research like Bybit’s 2026 Crypto Outlook, which says the classic four‑year Bitcoin cycle is fading as “macroeconomic policy, institutional participation, and market structure play a growing role in price formation.”
Macro is not exactly friendly, but crypto is trading with a resilient, derivatives‑heavy profile. Bitcoin changes hands near $69,100, up about 2.7% over the last 24 hours. Ethereum trades around $1,993, with a 24‑hour range between roughly $1,922 and $2,016. Solana sits close to $81.7, down from $83.2 a day earlier, while Hyperliquid changes hands near $34.2, up roughly 13.2% on the session. For Hayes, that backdrop is the setup: “If the macro is figgity fucked for a while, what can I buy? What is the highest quality project that has real users, paying real money, and giving that money back to token holders?” His answer is blunt: “Hyperliquid is the highest quality project in all of crypto across these metrics.”
