Arthur Hayes Says He's ‘Only’ Buying HYPE Tokens Right Now Despite Crypto Market Recovery

• Maelstrom founder and chief investment officer Arthur Hayes said he was only adding Hyperliquid to his portfolio even as the broader cryptocurrency market recovered.
• Earlier this year, Hayes set a $150 price target for HYPE, which was contingent on it continuing to take market share away from centralized exchanges. 
• In the past month, centralized players like Coinbase and decentralized exchanges like Aster have been expanding their suite of products.

Maelstrom founder and chief investment officer Arthur Hayes said on Wednesday that he’s only adding Hyperliquid (HYPE) to his portfolio right now despite the broader rally across the cryptocurrency market. 

“The only thing we're buying right now is HYPE,” he said in a post on X. On-chain data on HypurrScan, flagged by LookOnChain, also showed a pair of whales accumulating Hyperliquid on Wednesday morning. One bought over 200,000 HYPE tokens at $39.30, and the other bought 50,751 tokens at $38.50. 

HYPE’s price rose 7.5% in the last 24 hours to nearly $39, while Bitcoin (BTC) rose 4.4% in the last 24 hours to around $71,100. Hyperliquid’s native token remained more than 30% below its record high of over $59 seen seven months ago. 
 

However, retail sentiment on Stocktwits around Bitcoin managed to flip to ‘bullish’ from ‘bearish’ territory over the past day, while sentiment around Hyperliquid remained in ‘bearish’ territory.

DEX Perp Wars Are Heating Up

Hayes’ comments come as more decentralized and centralized platforms are looking to expand into perpetual trading for real-world assets (RWAs), including Coinbase (COIN) and Telegram (TON). 

Aster (ASTER), among the top three contenders of the perpetual DEX wars alongside Lighter (LIT) and EdgeX (EDGE), announced on Monday that it was teaming up with World Liberty Financial (WLFI) to launch gold, silver, and crude oil perpetual futures on its platform backed by the USD One (USD1) stablecoin.

Earlier this year, Hayes set a price target of $150 for HYPE, which he said will be realized by August this year. The basis for that estimate was that Hyperliquid needs to continue to take market share away from central exchanges and keep adding new features. 

“To get from Hell to Valhalla requires Hyperliquid to grow 30-day revenues to an annualized run rate of $1.4 billion, which it hit previously in August of last year,” he wrote. Hayes held Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), Zcash (ZEC) and HYPE in its portfolio as of March. 

Hyperlquid also unlocked nearly 10 million HYPE tokens on Monday, worth an estimated $376 million. 

Read also: Adam Back Denies He’s Satoshi Nakamoto, Says It’s ‘Coincidence And Similar Phrases’

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