If I had to summarize my judgment on HYPE in one sentence, it would be: bear markets are most likely to kill narratives and hardest to kill cash flow. HYPE is precisely one of the few cryptocurrencies that have transitioned from being a 'narrative asset' to a 'cash flow asset.' Currently, the HYPE price is still hovering around $38, with a market cap of about $9 billion to $9.8 billion; while the price will certainly fluctuate, what is more worthy of attention is that the protocol behind it has not collapsed, but has instead been continuously strengthened during the bear market.

Let's first look at the larger environment. From 2026 to now, it has not been a market suitable for 'rising through imagination.' A report by Reuters in February mentioned that Bitcoin had fallen by 28% within the year, Ethereum close to 38%, and the entire cryptocurrency market had evaporated about $2 trillion since the peak in October 2025. In other words, the market has shifted from a phase of 'buying anything' to a phase of 'only willing to pay for things that truly have income, users, and barriers.' It is precisely against this backdrop that HYPE's strength is even more convincing, as it is not the lucky one that rises with all coins in favorable winds, but rather one of the few assets that can still stand firm in adverse conditions.

Moreover, this 'standing firm' is not just words, but a firm price and fundamental support. MarketWatch wrote last week that HYPE rose about 60% against the broader bear market backdrop in 2026, while Bitcoin and Ethereum fell about 20% and 28% respectively during the same period. Today, DL News further provided the latest data: HYPE increased by 44% in March, Hyperliquid's weekly trading volume has reached 50 billion USD, and weekly active users are about 100,000. For me, this signal is very critical: the market is not valuing a story that might succeed in the future, but is re-pricing a trading engine that has already emerged.

Why can HYPE be more resilient in a bear market? The core reason is that it is essentially not 'bull market beta', but 'trading infrastructure beta'. The rise of many altcoins relies on continuous new capital inflows, relies on emotional spillover, and relies on everyone wanting to buy spot; whereas trading platforms like Hyperliquid are different, they thrive on the demands of trading, volatility, leverage, hedging, shorting, longing, and asset expansion. As long as there is still volatility in the market, even if it is volatility in a downtrend, perpetual contract platforms can still thrive. In recent weeks, as the conflict in Iran escalated and oil prices soared, MarketWatch mentioned that Hyperliquid experienced a significant surge in usage during this period, especially in oil price-related speculation; this is not a coincidence, but indicates that Hyperliquid is meeting the demand for 'global 24/7 risk trading'.

More importantly, Hyperliquid is not a protocol that simply has trading volume but lacks value return. The current page of DefiLlama shows that Hyperliquid Perps incurred about 64.68 million USD in fees over the last 30 days, approximately 58.14 million USD in income over the last 30 days, about 12.32 million USD in income over the last 7 days, with about 200.5 billion USD in perpetual trading volume over the last 30 days, and about 45.22 billion USD over the last 7 days. This set of numbers is no longer just 'okay' in on-chain protocols, but is genuinely at the top level. You can understand many altcoins as 'financing stories', but there is already a clear revenue engine behind HYPE.

This is not the end. What truly makes me optimistic about HYPE in the long term is not just that Hyperliquid will make money, but the way it makes money and the value capture of HYPE have already formed a relatively strong closed loop. Hyperliquid's official documentation states directly: in most protocols, fees mainly benefit teams and insiders; but in Hyperliquid, fees are 'entirely directed to the community', flowing to HLP, Assistance Fund, and deployers. More importantly, the Assistance Fund will automatically convert transaction fees to HYPE, and the HYPE in the Assistance Fund will be burned, permanently reducing circulation and total supply. In other words, as long as the platform continues to have trading, the buying and burning mechanism of HYPE will be continuously in operation. This is not just an abstract 'deflation narrative', but a value return explicitly written into the mechanisms at the protocol layer.

If the above layer represents 'trading business valuing HYPE', then HyperEVM opens a second layer of value source for HYPE. The official developer documentation states that HyperEVM shares HyperBFT consensus with HyperCore, and HYPE is the native gas of HyperEVM; at the same time, the base fee from EIP-1559 will be burned, and even the priority fee on HyperEVM will also be burned. In other words, HYPE is not just a 'platform token', it is also the underlying fuel when the application layer expands on this chain. As long as there are more applications, more interactions, and more capital accumulation on HyperEVM, the value logic of HYPE will no longer just be about the return of transaction fees, but will further layer on-chain usage demand.

Many people underestimate this point: HYPE is actually betting on both 'exchanges' and 'public chains' narratives at the same time, but its biggest difference from ordinary public chains is that it first has trading traffic, and then builds applications on top, rather than drawing an ecological pie first and then finding users. The official Hyperliquid documentation states clearly that Hyperliquid's state execution is divided into HyperCore and HyperEVM parts; HyperCore has a fully on-chain perpetual and spot order book, all orders, cancellations, transactions, and settlements occur transparently, and it has one-block finality, currently supporting 200,000 orders per second; HyperEVM brings in the EVM contract environment, allowing developers to directly use HyperCore's liquidity and financial primitives. The essence of this structure is not 'to create another EVM chain', but to connect high-frequency trading liquidity and programmable financial applications into the same state.

This is why I have always believed that Hyperliquid's competitors are not just a few perp DEXs, but something larger. In traditional crypto, many protocols address single-point problems: some do matching, some do AMM, some do wallets, some do lending, and some do EVM. What Hyperliquid wants to solve is to place 'trading, liquidity, asset issuance, and application layer' within a unified system. The official homepage states very clearly that its goal is a fully on-chain open financial system, ultimately 'to house all of finance'. This statement used to sound like a slogan, but recent product moves increasingly resemble a genuine effort to walk this path.

The best proof of this is that Hyperliquid has already begun to transition from 'only trading crypto' to 'trading the world's volatility'. On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices officially announced the authorization of Trade[XYZ] to launch the first and only officially authorized S&P 500 perpetual contract on Hyperliquid, emphasizing that this is based on institutional-grade index data and is a 24/7 on-chain product aimed at qualified non-U.S. investors. This action is very significant: it is not simply adding a trading pair, but indicates that Hyperliquid is moving the core benchmark assets from traditional finance into its trading network. For HYPE, this means that its valuation anchor is no longer just 'the on-chain perp leader', but is beginning to shift towards 'the global 24/7 risk asset trading layer'.

And the market is actually already pricing in this direction. Recent reports from DL News mentioned that Hyperliquid's weekly trading volume reached 50 billion USD, and HYPE rose 44% in March; other reports mentioned that after Hyperliquid's S&P 500 perpetual market went live, it quickly achieved a daily trading volume exceeding 100 million USD, swiftly entering the top ten most active markets on the platform. This indicates that it is not just going to have fun in the crypto-native circle, but is truly starting to find its place in 'price discovery during weekends, nights, and geopolitical shocks'. Once traditional markets close, the value of the on-chain 24/7 market suddenly becomes very concrete.

So, if I were to reargue 'why I am optimistic about HYPE in the long term', I would compress the logic into four sentences:

First, it has real business, not just pure narratives. In the last 30 days, 200.5 billion USD in perpetual trading volume and 58.14 million USD in protocol revenue, this scale is sufficient to support its transition from a story asset to a cash flow asset.

Second, it has strong value return, not just user growth. Transaction fees will automatically convert to HYPE and be burned, and HyperEVM makes HYPE a gas asset, with both base fees and priority fees being burned. This means that as long as the platform continues to be used, the supply-demand relationship of HYPE will constantly be reshaped by the protocol layer.

Third, its business model is suitable for bear markets. Pure spot narratives bleed the most in bear markets, but trading platforms can actually benefit from volatility, hedging, and cross-asset risk preferences. MarketWatch mentioned that HYPE rose by about 60% in the broader bear market, while Hyperliquid experienced a surge in usage during the Iranian conflict due to oil price speculation, which precisely confirms the logic that 'volatility equals traffic, traffic equals income'.

Fourth, its imaginative space has not yet been fully explored. The official authorization of perpetual contracts for the S&P 500 is just a beginning. As long as Hyperliquid continues to bring stock indices, commodities, forex-style assets, and even more traditional risk exposures on-chain, HYPE's ceiling will no longer be determined by the internal crypto bull and bear markets, but will start to be linked with the larger proposition of 'will global trading continue on-chain'.

Of course, after discussing the bullish logic, the risks must also be made clear. First, Hyperliquid's official risk documentation clearly mentions oracle manipulation risk: if the oracle maintained by validators is manipulated, the marked price may be affected, triggering erroneous liquidations. Second, although the official documentation states that running validation nodes is permissionless, the active validator set is transparently determined by the top 24 based on staking, this still means that system security, activity, and governance evolution are highly related to the validator structure. Third, the official Terms also state that its interface is not open to Restricted Persons, while MarketWatch also mentioned that U.S. users are restricted, how the regulatory boundaries will evolve in the future remains a variable hanging over all on-chain derivatives protocols. Fourth, even if the fundamentals are strong, HYPE currently has a market value close to 10 billion USD and hundreds of billions in FDV. If trading volumes slow down or the pace of product expansion is lower than expected, valuation compression will still come.

But overall, I now understand better than many why HYPE can still be so strong in a bear market. Because the market is no longer betting on 'whether it will succeed', but is gradually acknowledging 'it has succeeded in part, and this part happens to be the most scarce thing in a bear market': real users, real transactions, real income, real destruction, and a trading base that is still expanding into larger financial markets. This is the fundamental reason why I am optimistic about HYPE in the long term.