The SPCX perp on Hyperliquid generated trading volume of USD 1.4 billion on the day of the SpaceX listing. As a result, the contract became the highest-volume market in the HIP-3 ecosystem, coinciding with the largest IPO in history.
HIP-3 (Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3) is a framework on Hyperliquid's infrastructure that allows qualified developers to launch their own permissionless perpetual futures markets. Traders there can access stocks, commodities, indices, currencies and cryptocurrencies, around the clock and without an intermediary broker. The framework originally went live in October 2025. Meanwhile, the deployer Trade.xyz made the xyz:SPCX contract available later, in May 2026. The daily volume on the listing day corresponded to roughly 30% of total HIP-3 volume that day. In the three weeks before, however, the daily average had stood at only around USD 26 million. The jump of roughly 54-fold shows how strongly a single event can move the still young HIP-3 markets.
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Price discovery before the listing: SPCX perp traded weeks ahead of the Nasdaq
Trade.xyz listed the xyz:SPCX perp on Hyperliquid as early as mid-May 2026, therefore weeks before the official trading start on the Nasdaq. The contract initially opened on the basis of a reference price of USD 150, which corresponded to a fully diluted valuation of roughly USD 1.78 trillion. A fully diluted valuation counts all potential shares and thus provides an upper bound for the enterprise value. This reference price therefore reflected the market's expectation of SpaceX, long before a regular share price existed.
In the weeks that followed, the perp showed its own price discovery. The price briefly rose to a high of USD 216, before it later settled in the range between USD 166 and USD 185. This range consequently signaled a market expectation well above the later IPO offering price of USD 135. At the same time, a parallel offering formed on the centralized exchanges: Bybit, Binance and Bitget announced tokenized SpaceX shares for allocation around the listing. Two models thus faced each other, the decentralized perpetual contract on one side, the tokenized share products of the centralized exchanges on the other.
On IPO day, the centralized exchanges failed
SpaceX debuted in June 2026 under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq. With proceeds of USD 75 billion from the sale of 555.6 million shares, it was the largest listing in history. This figure clearly surpassed Saudi Aramco's USD 30 billion from 2019. The offering price stood at USD 135, while the share closed the first trading day at USD 160.95 and therefore 19% higher. Consequently, the implied market capitalization after the close reached more than USD 2 trillion. The company recently generated around USD 19 billion in annual revenue, but does not yet turn a profit. On this very day, the SPCX perp on Hyperliquid settled its record volume of USD 1.4 billion.
On the centralized exchanges, however, the day unfolded chaotically. Bybit, Binance and Bitget canceled their announced allocations of tokenized SpaceX shares and refunded the payments. As the reason, the platforms cited a supply shortfall: they could not source enough underlying shares to back the tokens. As a result, the model that promises economic participation through deposited real shares broke down. Tokenized shares mirror a real share one-to-one and therefore require seamless custody of the underlying assets.
The decentralized perp, by contrast, ran through without interruption, because it needs no physical share backing. Instead of depositing an underlying asset, the contract reflects the price synthetically through supply and demand. While the products of the centralized exchanges failed, the SPCX perp on Hyperliquid absorbed the demand for SpaceX exposure. The HYPE token reacted immediately and gained around 10% on the listing.
Stock perps displace commodities in the shift of HIP-3 volume
Within HIP-3, the volume mix has shifted fundamentally. Stock-linked perps generated more than USD 18.8 billion in volume in the first half of June 2026, while crude oil contracts on WTI and Brent combined reached only USD 7.66 billion. In the first quarter of 2026, commodity perps had originally still dominated the volume. Since late May, however, the ratio tipped in favor of stocks, triggered by rising volatility in the US stock market. Stock perps thus accounted for more than double the crude oil volume.
This shift simultaneously establishes HIP-3 as a venue for 24/7 US stock exposure, therefore also outside regular trading hours. Until now, this offering was reserved mainly for CFD platforms and centralized exchanges. Furthermore, the peak in open interest across all HIP-3 markets reached USD 3.2 billion in June 2026, which underlines the depth of these young markets.
Over the entire period since the launch in October 2025, HIP-3 volume ultimately added up to more than USD 275 billion, and more than 140 active trading pairs are now available. Anyone who wants to open their own market receives the first three markets for free, while further ones are allocated through a Dutch auction. The growth curve therefore runs steeply, carried by a growing number of deployers and asset classes.
HYPE buyback flywheel and the next catalyst
Trading volume from HIP-3 translates directly into price pressure on the HYPE token. The fees of a HIP-3 market split evenly between deployer and protocol, while up to 99% of all protocol fees subsequently flow into the so-called Assistance Fund, which buys back HYPE on the open market. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, these buybacks amounted to USD 192.25 million. Higher trading activity therefore feeds demand for the token directly. The more volume the deployers draw through their markets, the greater the buyback pressure becomes.
This mechanism is likewise reflected in the price performance. HYPE traded at around USD 21 in early 2026 and reached a high of USD 62.18 in May. Over a one-year horizon, the token is additionally up roughly 137%. Anyone who wants to operate a HIP-3 market as a deployer must moreover stake at least 500,000 HYPE (around USD 25 million). This barrier to entry locks up additional supply and creates further demand pressure on the token.
The IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI prepared for 2026 are regarded as the next possible catalysts. Further high-profile IPOs would test the decentralized perp model once again as a benchmark for early trading. The SpaceX listing provided initial proof of this at large scale.
