HYPE Soars Past $27 as Hyperliquid’s Metals Trading Ignites Frenzy

Forget gold bars and vaults—digital metals are minting millionaires on-chain.

Hyperliquid's bold pivot into tokenized precious metals is paying off in spades, sending its native HYPE token rocketing above the $27 mark. The platform's activity charts look like a vertical climb, proving that when you merge DeFi's liquidity with real-world assets, money follows—fast.

The Mechanics of the Move

Hyperliquid didn't just add another meme coin. It built a bridge between crypto's 24/7 markets and the ancient, physical world of gold and silver. Suddenly, traders can leverage positions on precious metals without ever touching a physical ounce—or dealing with a traditional broker's paperwork and fees. It's a classic crypto play: cut out the middleman, unlock global liquidity, and watch the volume explode.

Why This Rally Has Legs

This isn't just speculative froth. The surge is directly tied to measurable, on-chain activity. More trades, more value locked, more users—the fundamentals are flashing green. It turns out there's massive, pent-up demand for a streamlined, permissionless way to trade commodities. Who knew? (Every crypto native with a distaste for Wall Street's gatekeepers, that's who.)

A New Blueprint for DeFi

Hyperliquid's success throws down a gauntlet. It proves that DeFi's next massive growth phase won't come from inventing new, abstract assets, but from seamlessly digitizing old, proven ones. The trillion-dollar commodities market is now on the table, and the race to capture it is officially on.

So, while traditional finance debates digital gold ETFs in committee meetings for years, crypto just built, launched, and pumped it—delivering returns that would make any legacy metals fund manager blush, assuming they could even see the blockchain through the fog of their morning Bloomberg terminal.

The HIP-3 markets saw a surge in activity, as whales could easily pivot from crypto to the surging gold and silver markets. The rally in precious metals replaced previous hopes of an altcoin market or a recovery of top memes. 

Hyperliquid open interest still stands at $7.21B, after attempts to regain higher levels. In the past weeks, there has been a notable rotation from crypto trading into silver and gold, expecting the metals to continue their winning streak. 

HIP-3 trading on Hyperliquid brings whale traders to metals

HIP-3, the fully permissionless trading platform built by Hyperliquid, quickly managed to adopt metals trading and tap into the current hype. 

On the market platform, open interest is at $816M, with $18.69B in volumes for the past month. The platform also gauges the interest of traders for its permissionless custom markets. 

As of January 27, the most actively traded HIP-3 asset was silver, with $165.3M in open interest. Silver had two markets with a slight price disparity. 

On HIP-3, stocks and metals surpassed crypto pairs as the biggest activity hubs. The rotation replaced the usual crypto shift between BTC and major altcoins, instead using the infrastructure to build immediate representation for other markets and more active assets. 

The perpetual futures are still settled in crypto and do not confer ownership. However, the market offers immediate, international, and permissionless access to speculate on the price of silver. Activity on HIP-3 shows on-chain trading will not stall, but instead find new sources of growth. 

Will the rotation into metals reverse? 

The rotation into metals is creating an expectation that once the peak rally has ended, traders may return to crypto. 

For now, silver is still ahead of ETH as the most traded asset, but there are signs of whales betting on a reversal. 

A whale recently opened a XYZ: silver short position, with a dramatic 20X leverage. The position has a $135.93 liquidation price, and currently carries over $4.7M in unrealized loss. The whale opened the total short position over the past 12 hours, after rotating out of ETH. 

For now, the position is an outlier and a rarity among whales. The current market structure also shows metals are seen as a speculative opportunity by crypto traders, rather than a long-term store of value. For silver, the all-time high prices are seen as an anomaly, and crypto on-chain traders have different objectives compared to spot buyers.

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