Hyperliquid's Q3 revenue rose 21.7% to $190.9 million, yet Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. (NASDAQ: PURR) trades down over 5% on Thursday. That's the kind of split-screen moment that makes crypto markets fun: the underlying business is growing, but the publicly traded wrapper is having a rough day.
USDC Reserve Income Helps Lift Q3 Revenue
Trading and network revenue climbed from $43.8 million in July to $68.6 million in September, with total revenue including reserve yield reaching $83.5 million that month, the strongest since October 2025.
Native perpetuals still generated the bulk of that revenue at $141.9 million, though quarterly revenue remained 36.5% below the same period last year.
A new income stream helped close part of that gap as Hyperliquid began earning a share of USDC (CRYPTO: USDC) reserve income on Aug. 27 under an arrangement called AQAv2, adding $17.3 million in just over a month at an annualized rate near $197.6 million.
However, one risk worth watching: the arrangement runs through a counterparty that competes with Hyperliquid in adjacent businesses, with contract terms that aren't publicly readable. That's the financial equivalent of lending your car to a neighbor who also runs a taxi service. It can work, but you'd like to see the paperwork.
Higher HYPE Prices Reduce Buyback Impact
The Assistance Fund spent $148.7 million buying HYPE across all 92 days of the quarter, up 5.7% from Q2.
But the average purchase price rose from $50.79 to $72.93, so that bigger budget actually bought 26.4% fewer tokens, just 2.04 million HYPE. Spending more to get less is never the headline you want, even if it's just math doing its thing.
Factor in staking emissions and team distributions, and HYPE's available float still grew by roughly 1.70 million tokens despite the buybacks.
Syncracy Capital's Sunny Shi, who wrote the report's foreword, sees buybacks as a way to offset new supply from development funding and vesting, not drive growth on their own.
He argued the real growth driver going forward should be independent teams building on Hyperliquid, rather than Labs' own treasury spending. In other words, the ecosystem needs builders, not just a well-funded treasury buying its own token.
Trump Backs US Access as Regulatory Approval Remains Pending
Trump told technology and crypto executives at an Aug. 19 White House meeting that the CFTC was working to bring Hyperliquid to the US, and within a month, Kraken's parent company proposed a regulated derivatives venue on Hyperliquid using Bitnomial as operator.
That proposal remained pending regulatory approval at quarter-end, with US persons still excluded from the platform throughout Q3. So the door is cracked open, but nobody has walked through it yet.
Why Trading Activity Broke Records Despite the Risks
Average daily traders hit a quarterly record of 65,161, up 20% from Q2, while quarter-end open interest reached $16.76 billion, up nearly 80%.
Equities overtook commodities as HIP-3's largest asset class after equity trading volume rose 160.8% from the previous quarter.
However, trade[XYZ] handled 98.9% of all HIP-3 volume, leaving the platform heavily dependent on one operator. That's a concentration risk worth keeping an eye on.
HyperEVM showed weaker results, with total value locked falling 17.4% and decentralized exchange volume declining 24%, despite rising transactions and wallet counts.
Those figures suggest increased network usage has yet to bring comparable growth in capital committed or trading volume. More people are showing up, but they aren't necessarily bringing their wallets.
