When Bitcoin was hovering near $100,000 last October, Hyperliquid's open interest peaked at $15 billion. Then the October 10 liquidation cascade hit, and the number cratered along with the rest of the market. Fast forward to today: open interest on the platform is back at $11.51 billion, the highest it has been since that crash, even though BTC is now sitting around $65K and the broader crypto market cap is still roughly 45% below its pre-crash level.
The gap between those two facts matters. Hyperliquid is growing inside a market that hasn't recovered. Total crypto open interest tracked by Coinglass sits at $116.66 billion, down 47% from October 10. Hyperliquid is moving in the opposite direction, and HYPE, the platform's token, is up around 34% over the same stretch that wrecked most other assets.
RWA perps quietly took over the leaderboard
The biggest driver behind the open interest recovery isn't Bitcoin or HYPE itself. It's real-world asset perpetuals. Under HIP-3, a framework that went live on October 13, 2025, anyone can stake 500,000 HYPE and deploy a perp market without needing approval from the core team. The result: $3.61 billion in daily open interest tied to RWA perps alone, which is now the single largest slice of Hyperliquid's book, ahead of Bitcoin perps, HYPE perps, and other L1 tokens.
The volume split tells you how fast this happened. At the start of the year, core perps held 97% of platform volume. Now HIP-3 markets and core perps are splitting it evenly, 50-50. That's a near-total reversal in about six months.
A bigger share of a smaller market
Measured against major centralized exchanges, Hyperliquid's share of perp open interest reached 9.5%, an all-time high on Hypeflows data. Back in late May it was 6.9%. That's a meaningful jump, and it reflects both genuine growth on Hyperliquid's side and the fact that CEX open interest is still depressed from the October selloff.
Hyperliquid's own open interest is still about 23% below the October 2025 peak of $15 billion. The platform is gaining ground relative to competitors, but the absolute numbers haven't fully recovered. The $11.51 billion figure is a milestone for this year, not a return to the highs.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.
