Good morning, Asia. Here’s what’s happening in the market:
Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, your daily digest of the top news from the U.S. and an overview of market moves and analysis. For a detailed overview of the US market, see CoinDesk’s Americas Crypto Diary.
The next $200 billion valuation debate for cryptocurrencies may be shaping up to look a lot like Solana did last cycle, according to a new report from Cantor Fitzgerald, which first reported on Hyperion DeFi (HYPD) and Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR).
Cantor defined the stock as more than just a passive digital asset finance company (DAT). Unlike traditional DATs that simply store tokens and wait for price appreciation, both companies are positioned as players in the Hyperliquid ecosystem that generate revenue through staking, verification, and market-building activities.
This operational risk underpins a valuation thesis that sees Hyperliquid less as a speculative DeFi protocol and more like a layer 1 platform business, echoing the bull case once applied to Solana.
In Cantor’s 10-year model, Hyperliquid generates over $5 billion in annual fees and is valued at 50x, meaning HYPE has a market capitalization of over $200 billion, while HYPD and PURR provide the public market with the opportunity to gain this advantage through active balance sheet deployment rather than simple token custody.
This comparison is important because it redefines how decentralized exchanges are valued. In the case of Solana, investors finally stopped viewing the token as a speculative throughput play and started modeling it as financial infrastructure capable of generating persistent cash flows.
Cantor made the same argument for Hyperliquid, pointing to the protocol’s fee structure, in which roughly 99% of trading revenue is recycled into token buybacks, directly linking volume growth to supply reductions rather than shareholder dilution.
Cantor believes these fees come from an underlying market still dominated by centralized exchanges, with perpetual futures trading volume set to exceed $60 trillion by 2025.
Even modest share gains for these venues could translate into hundreds of billions of incremental dollars and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual fees, anchoring Hyperliquid’s growth case on the migration of existing liquidity rather than creating speculative demand.
The report also addresses growing competition concerns, particularly around Aster, a rival DEX backed by Binance-affiliated interests that briefly surpassed Hyperliquid in monthly trading volume.
Cantor believes that points-based incentives and airdrop farming have grossly inflated Aster’s activity, pointing to an unusually high volume-to-open-interest ratio that suggests trading is driven by rewards rather than directional beliefs. As these incentives fade, Cantor expects liquidity to be reconsolidated back into venues offering deeper books, better execution and sustainable fee models.
Whether the market will ultimately reward a leverage-driven trading network with 50x returns remains an open question, but the fact that the debate now mirrors Solana’s own evolution suggests that Hyperliquid is being judged by a familiar, more ambitious valuation yardstick.
Market trends:
Bitcoin: Bitcoin was little changed near $87,572, up 0.2% hourly and 2.0% over the 24 hours, but is still down 4.9% for the week and 7.8% over the 30 days.
Ethereum: Ethereum is trading around $2,954, with slight hourly and daily gains of 0.4%, but has underperformed over the long term, down 10.9% on a weekly basis and 4.6% over 30 days.
Gold: Gold prices are trading near the top of their range, with signs of near-term weakness pointing to a possible pullback to $4,200 as traders prepare for central bank decisions, although the broader uptrend remains intact.
Nikkei 225 Index: Asia-Pacific markets were mixed on Wednesday as Japanese exports beat expectations, stocks across the region were mostly steady, oil prices rose on new news of sanctions on Venezuela, and U.S. stocks ended lower overnight on uncertain jobs data.
Elsewhere in Cryptocurrency
- US Senate Warren calls for Trump-related cryptocurrency investigation as market structure bill delays (CoinDesk)
- Coinbase faces risk of cryptocurrency ‘cannibalization’ as prediction markets push: Mizuho (Decrypt)
