Hyperliquid’s $200 billion pitch: Is this next Solana-scale DeFi bet?: Asia Morning Briefing

• Cantor Fitzgerald's report suggests Hyperliquid DeFi could reach a $200 billion valuation, similar to Solana's previous cycle.
• Hyperliquid is positioned as a layer 1 platform business, generating significant fees through staking and validation.
• The report highlights competition from Aster, but suggests Hyperliquid's sustainable fee model will attract liquidity.

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Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of top stories during U.S. hours and an overview of market moves and analysis. For a detailed overview of U.S. markets, see CoinDesk's Crypto Daybook Americas.

Crypto’s next $200 billion valuation debate may already be taking shape, and it looks a lot like Solana during the last cycle, according to a new report from Cantor Fitzgerald, which initiates coverage of Hyperion DeFi (HYPD) and Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR).

Cantor frames the equities as more than passive digital asset treasury companies (DATs). Unlike conventional DATs that simply warehouse tokens and wait for price appreciation, both companies are positioned as yield-generating participants in the Hyperliquid ecosystem through staking, validation, and market-building activity.

That operational exposure underpins a valuation thesis that treats Hyperliquid less like a speculative DeFi protocol and more like a layer 1 platform business, echoing the bull cases once applied to Solana.

In Cantor’s 10-year model, Hyperliquid generates more than $5 billion in annual fees and is valued at a 50x multiple, implying a HYPE market capitalization north of $200 billion, with HYPD and PURR offering public-market access to that upside via active balance-sheet deployment rather than simple token custody.

The comparison matters because it reframes how decentralized exchanges are being valued. In Solana’s case, investors eventually moved past treating the token as a speculative throughput play and began modeling it as financial infrastructure capable of generating durable cash flows.

Cantor is making the same argument for Hyperliquid, pointing to the protocol’s fee structure, where roughly 99% of trading revenue is recycled into token buybacks, directly linking volume growth to supply reduction rather than shareholder dilution.

Cantor argues those fees are coming from an addressable market still dominated by centralized exchanges, where perpetual futures volumes exceeded $60 trillion in 2025.

Even modest share gains from those venues translate into hundreds of billions of dollars in incremental volume and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual fees, anchoring Hyperliquid’s growth case in the migration of existing liquidity rather than speculative demand creation.

The report also addresses rising competitive concerns, particularly around Aster, a rival perp DEX backed by Binance-affiliated interests that briefly surpassed Hyperliquid in monthly volume.

Cantor argues that Aster’s activity is heavily inflated by points-based incentives and airdrop farming, noting unusually high volume-to-open-interest ratios that suggest trading driven by rewards rather than directional conviction. As those incentives fade, Cantor expects liquidity to consolidate back toward venues offering deeper books, better execution, and sustainable fee models.

Whether markets ultimately underwrite a 50x multiple for a leverage-driven trading network remains an open question, but the fact that the debate now mirrors Solana’s own evolution suggests Hyperliquid is being judged by a familiar, and far more ambitious, valuation standard.

Market Movements:

BTC: Bitcoin was little changed near $87,572, up 0.2% on the hour and 2.0% over 24 hours, but still down 4.9% on the week and 7.8% over 30 days.

ETH: Ether traded around $2,954, edging up 0.4% on the hour and day, while underperforming longer term with a 10.9% weekly drop and a 4.6% decline over 30 days.

Gold: Gold is trading choppily near the top of its range, with signs of short-term exhaustion pointing to a possible pullback toward $4,200 as traders brace for central bank decisions, even as the broader uptrend remains intact.

Nikkei 225: Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed Wednesday as Japan’s exports beat expectations, equities were mostly steady across the region, and oil prices rose on fresh Venezuela sanctions headlines, while U.S. stocks closed lower overnight amid jobs data uncertainty.

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• Coinbase Risks Crypto 'Cannibalization' With Prediction Market Push: Mizuho (Decrypt)
  

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