Arthur Hayes Bullish on Hyperliquid, Predicts $150 Target: Why It's the Most Attractive Crypto Asset in a Bear Market

BitMEX co-founder and Maelstrom Fund manager Arthur Hayes recently released an in-depth analysis report on Hyperliquid ($HYPE), suggesting its token price could reach $150 by August 2026, nearly a 5x increase from its current level of around $30. This prediction is not based on market sentiment but on Hyperliquid's unique business model and revenue distribution mechanism. Hyperliquid currently boasts the highest revenue among non-stablecoin projects in the crypto space, with a remarkable 97% of its revenue used to repurchase and burn $HYPE tokens, a mechanism rarely seen in the industry. Hayes points out that even if the overall market is in a consolidation or downtrend, this continuous capital return mechanism can provide solid support for the token price, enabling it to appreciate independently of the broader market.

The key to achieving the $150 target lies in Hyperliquid's revenue growth path. Hayes predicts that its 30-day annualized revenue will increase from $843 million in March this year to $1.4 billion, a level briefly achieved in August 2025. To achieve this goal, Hyperliquid only needs to capture approximately 3.97% of the global crypto perpetual contract market from centralized exchanges. Considering that the protocol is only three years old and has already captured a significant share of the decentralized exchange (DEX) market, this goal is realistic. Two major product upgrades are the core drivers of growth. The first is the HIP-3 protocol, which has contributed nearly 10% of total revenue in just four months since its launch. This protocol allows any user staking 500,000 HYPE to freely create perpetual contract markets, and it currently supports 24-hour leveraged trading of traditional assets such as gold, silver, and the Nasdaq 100, with an average daily trading volume of hundreds of millions of dollars. Hayes expects HIP-3 revenue to grow by 160% in the next six months, mainly benefiting from the surge in global retail investors' demand for 24/7 trading in non-traditional markets.

The second is the HIP-4 protocol, which will be launched within three months and will support permissionless prediction markets, including binary options and zero-day options. Although Hayes did not include it in the base model, he believes it has significant upside potential. In terms of valuation, the current price-to-earnings ratio of $HYPE is approximately 12x, far lower than traditional financial giants CME Group (26x) and Coinbase (approximately 40x). Hayes believes that as Hyperliquid becomes a core venue for price discovery of precious metals and stock indices during weekends and market holidays, its valuation should be on par with CME. Under the $1.4 billion revenue forecast, a price-to-earnings ratio of 25x provides reasonable support for the $150 target price. In addition, the team's token release ratio has dropped significantly from 20% at the end of 2024 to 1% at the beginning of 2025, indicating that the team is actively reducing selling pressure to support the price. The Maelstrom Fund has established a position in the $20+ range, and $HYPE is currently its largest liquid holding outside of Bitcoin.