Arthur Hayes Has a $150 Price Target for Hyperliquid by August – Here Is Why

Arthur Hayes, founder of BitMEX and Maelstrom fund manager, published a detailed thesis on Hyperliquid this week, arguing that $HYPE is the highest-quality crypto asset to hold during a sideways or bearish market, with a price target of $150 by August 2026, roughly 5x from its current price of approximately $30.

The Core Argument

Hayes builds his thesis around a pattern that held during the last crypto sideways market in early 2023: exchange tokens outperform everything else. Exchanges collect fees regardless of whether prices are rising or falling, and sometimes more aggressively during volatile periods. The exchange token that dominated that period was GMX, which hit an all-time high of $90 in April 2023 by leading perpetuals DEX volume. Hayes argues Hyperliquid is the 2026 version of that trade, with significantly stronger fundamentals.

The specific number that anchors the thesis is revenue. Hyperliquid is currently the largest revenue-generating project in all of crypto that is not a stablecoin. It routes 97% of that revenue into buying back HYPE tokens from the open market. No other project in crypto returns capital to token holders at that rate. Hayes describes this as the central reason HYPE can appreciate in absolute terms even if the broader market stays flat.

The Path to $150

Hayes models the target around Hyperliquid growing its 30-day annualized revenue run rate from approximately $843 million in March to $1.4 billion by August, a level the protocol already hit previously in August 2025. Achieving that requires capturing an additional 3.97% of the global crypto perpetuals market from centralized exchanges. Given that Hyperliquid did not exist three years ago and already holds meaningful DEX market share, Hayes considers this achievable.

Two product developments carry most of the growth assumptions. HIP-3, the permissionless perpetuals protocol, already represents close to 10% of Hyperliquid’s total revenue after only four months. It allows anyone staking 500,000 HYPE to list perp markets on any asset. Gold, silver, and Nasdaq 100 perps are already trading hundreds of millions of dollars daily through the protocol. Hayes projects HIP-3 revenues growing 160% over six months as demand for 24/7 leveraged trading on traditional assets from global retail expands.

HIP-4, enabling permissionless prediction markets including binary options and zero-day options, is expected to launch within three months. Hayes excludes it from his base model and treats it as upside.

The Valuation Case

HYPE currently trades at roughly 12 times earnings. CME Group trades at 26x. Coinbase at approximately 40x. Robinhood between those two. Hayes argues HYPE deserves at minimum a CME-level multiple as it becomes the price discovery venue for precious metals and equity indices during weekends when traditional exchanges are closed. His model assumes a 25x forward multiple against the $1.4 billion revenue target.

On team token supply risk, distributions dropped from roughly 20% of awarded tokens in November and December to approximately 1% in January and February. Hayes attributes the reduction to the team choosing to support the token price after initial tax and lifestyle expenses were covered.

Maelstrom entered positions in the mid-$20s. HYPE is now their largest liquid position outside Bitcoin.

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