Hyperliquid is handling record derivatives activity while retaining a smaller share of the fees it generates. Open interest reached just above $11 billion on July 13, the platform’s highest in 2026, and 30-day perpetual futures volume approached $178 billion. Its share of global open perpetual futures positions rose to roughly 9%, up from under 7% in late May, including against centralized exchanges. Yet gross protocol revenue has declined each quarter since peaking at roughly $357 million in the third quarter of 2025, falling to nearly $295 million, then roughly $217 million, and then about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026, a 43% drop from the top. The shift is tied in part to Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal, or HIP-3, which since October 2025 has allowed users staking 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, to launch their own perpetual futures markets on Hyperliquid’s order books and keep up to half the trading fees. Those builder-deployed markets grew from about 2% of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly half of it now. As a result, cost of revenue rose from under 6% of gross revenue in the second quarter of 2025 to 18% a year later. Builder code fees charged by front-ends such as Phantom added roughly $16 million of revenue in the second quarter and exited as roughly $16 million of cost, effectively passing straight through. Traders have continued to gravitate to the platform because these markets list products with limited alternatives elsewhere, especially real-world asset perps (perpetual futures tied to non-crypto assets). Open interest in those contracts, including crude oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla, a Nasdaq-100 tracker and pre-IPO names like SpaceX, hit a record $3.6 billion this month and surpassed bitcoin as Hyperliquid’s largest market by that measure. Between July 13 and July 19, tokenized stocks and commodities generated $25 billion in volume, or 52% of the weekly total, overtaking crypto perps for the first time. The products settle in stablecoins, never expire, and can trade through weekends when the New York Stock Exchange is closed, offering around-the-clock leveraged exposure such as Nvidia trading at 2 a.m. on a Sunday.