HYPE’s price has risen nearly 20% over the past two days, surpassing the $46 mark since October of last year. Bullish momentum has picked up on news that Bitwise’s Hyperliquid Spot ETF begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange today under the ticker BHYP. This is the first cryptocurrency ETF in the US where the issuer operates its own infrastructure rather than outsourcing it. The sponsor fee is set at 0.34%, and is fully waived during the first 30 days on the first $500 million of fund assets. Two days ago on May 13th. 21Shares has launched its HYPE ETFwhich routes its share through third-party providers. This design choice created the first real fringe competition in the Hyperliquid enterprise product race.
News that Coinbase has become the official USDC vault distributor on Hyperliquid has added fuel to the rally. HYPE currently trades with a market cap of $11.8 billion and ranks as the 10th largest crypto asset.
The indoor staking game that no one else has
Bitwise will stake the fund’s HYPE holdings through its private arm called Bitwise Onchain Solutions. This is a unique situation given that other U.S. Hyperliquid ETFs, including the 21Shares product launched Tuesday, rely on third-party operators to handle the staking process. Third-party staking operators receive a portion of the rewards, and on-chain where the base yield for HYPE staking hovers around 2.2%, this reduction doubles over the life of the ETF position. Keeping it in-house by Bitwise is how it can lower fees while still earning a margin on the staked portion.
Grayscale is next in line to launch a Hyperliquid ETF but a launch date has not yet been confirmed. This insider betting game has effectively reshaped the way institutions can handle future volatility. The reality now is that institutions have two choices: build a storage stack from scratch, which requires the kind of validation relationships Bitwise developed over a year ago, or accept lower margins and try to compete on distribution alone.
Early flows show that demand is real
Flow and volume data from 21Shares THYP ETF highlight just how much demand is on the table right now. The ETF recorded trading volume of $1.8 million on its first trading day, then exceeded $8.31 million by Thursday. Data from SoSoValue It shows that in the first few days of trading, the cumulative net inflow totaled $2.52 million.
Special hyperliquid metrics help explain the rush. As mentioned in Bitwise press releaseThe platform processed $2.9 trillion in trading volume in 2025, 400% higher than the previous year. It holds approximately 60% of the global open interest onchain derivatives and handles approximately 200,000 orders per second.
Validators and brokers, same week
The broader context is what makes today’s launch notable. Hyperliquid launched HIP-3 in October last year, opening up a permissionless perp market to anyone willing to stake 500,000 HYPE (about $22 million at current prices) and accept reduced risk. The move institutionalized the trading layer, allowing offshore builders like trade.xyz to launch tokens for Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and the synthetic Nasdaq index.
BHYP institutionalizes the auditor layer in parallel. One US regulated asset manager is now actively betting on HYPE to secure the network and pass the return back to ETF holders. The same protocol that received royalties published by its creator seven months ago now gets a Wall Street issuer running the validation infrastructure on it.
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