Macro risk appetite weakens → high beta gets hit first

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Fed rate-hike policy disagreement, South Korea tightening leverage, and SpaceX breaking issue prices—all suppress global risk assets and drive the crypto market to collectively deleverage. As a top DEX and on-chain perpetuals leader, HYPE is especially sensitive to capital flows, so its selling pressure is naturally stronger than that of “benchmark assets” like BTC and ETH.

• Chip side: double psychological pressure from whales + the double unlocks by the team

The team develops a wallet transfer to move $32.3 million in HYPE to market-making/exchanges, plus the monthly team unlocks; the market is prone to trade the “dumping expectations” first. If well-known institutions fully liquidate as well, it would further shatter long-side confidence. Even if the actual sell pressure may be carried out in steps, the sentiment has already triggered a flight-to-safety response.

• Negative feedback from derivatives: liquidation → forced selling → liquidation again

HYPE itself is an ecosystem concentrated with large contract traders. When long positions cluster to liquidate, the downside can be amplified by about a round: price falls trigger liquidations → liquidations trigger sell-offs → the price tests lower again → more liquidations. In the past 24 hours, over ten million long positions were liquidated, and open interest shrank—these are classic signs of deleveraging.

• The long-term discount from regulation and competition

The Monetary Authority of Singapore has added it to a warning list. While it’s not a ban, it will affect institutions’ and compliant capital’s willingness to participate. Meanwhile, competitors like Aster and Lighter siphon off trading volume, weakening the support strength of “fee buybacks and burn.” The market worries that the fundamental growth rate may slow at the margin.

A quick add-on on the current market backdrop (as of 2026-07-17)

• HYPE reached a historical high of about 75–77 USD in late May to early June. After that, it entered a period of high-range consolidation and pullbacks. The “pullback of more than 15% from 77 USD” you mentioned is broadly consistent with the roughly 17% drawdown from on-chain statistics.

• Recently (around July 17), HYPE’s 24h decline has been in the 6–10% range, with the price hovering near 62–65 USD. It’s clearly underperforming BTC (about -1% to -2%) and ETH (about -2%), which matches the description of “the screen killing the core benchmark.”

• On the fundamentals: Hyperliquid’s user base, TVL, and the fee buyback mechanism are still in operation (on the order of tens of millions of USD in buybacks over the last 30 days). However, in the short term, price is dominated by positioning and sentiment—so the divergence of “price down, volume up, on-chain activity high, but heavy sell pressure in the secondary market” does exist right now.

Overall, this leg of the drop is the four-way convergence of macro deleveraging, an expectation of capital release/unwinding, derivatives liquidation cascades, and the regulatory/competition narrative. It’s very typical of a high-beta leader like HYPE to be amplified in the market’s price action. The key points ahead are:

• Will team/whale transfers keep turning into real sell pressure?

• Can the 60–62 USD area stop the cascade of liquidations?

• Whether the messaging from the US stock market/the Federal Reserve has eased at the margin, easing the overall sell-off of risk assets.$HYPE

HYPEUSDT

Perp

77.51

-4.72%

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