TradeXYZ: Onboarding the world to Hyperliquid, Part I

Wallet Cluster Removal

We removed two clusters of manufactured wallets from every figure in this report. The first is a bot fleet on XYZ100: 7,663 wallets that arrived in bursts between December and March, each funded with one small deposit, ran hundreds of fills and stopped by June.

The second is a crude oil farm: 49,727 wallets that each made a single $10 trade between Mar 19 and Apr 7 and never traded again, funded through chains of single-use wallets. Neither moved volume in any meaningful way, but together they would have inflated the number of wallets onboarded through xyz markets from 173,794 to 231,184.

Growing Market Dominance

As the team continued to deploy new markets (104 are live today), their share of volume on the exchange grew. Each new market brought in net new users, and several macro catalysts throughout the year accelerated it.

While volume did grow, the better measure that confirms their impact is open interest. xyz went from 0.2% during launch week, back when XYZ100 was the only market, to 25.9% on Sep 8, peaking at 37.2% on Aug 14. That share rose even as total open interest expanded from $7.4B in the launch week to $14.3B this month. A quarter of the directional exposure on the exchange now sits in markets launched by xyz.

Each period brought in a higher share of first-time Hyperliquid users than the one before. From 22% at launch to 60% with the latest semiconductor and memory mania, the team's ability to list new markets global users want to trade has been a key factor in their growing dominance.

Launch (October 13th to December 31st): After launch we saw 33,641 first-time xyz traders, 7,222 of them new to Hyperliquid. Their XYZ100 contract traded $8.4B and was the entry for 16,749 of the 33,641, with NVDA and TSLA next. Nearly 80% of xyz traders were existing users of the platform now trying a new asset class.

Commodity Complex (January 1st to March 2nd): 71,240 first-time xyz traders, 30,661 of them new to Hyperliquid. Silver traded $28.3B, the largest market of the period. As the commodity complex experienced a generational move, Hyperliquid users were able to capitalize on the volatility through these markets.

Oil & Iran War (March 3rd to May 16th): As the US-Iran conflict escalated and the world began tracking every ship sailing through the Strait of Hormuz, another story was taking place onchain. Weekend updates or an ad hoc Trump tweet would send markets into disarray, and while traditional markets were waiting for the CME to open Sunday night, Hyperliquid remained open. These geopolitical tensions brought 90,447 first-timers to xyz markets with 44,038 new to Hyperliquid. Crude traded $47.8B and Brent $21.6B. Between March 7th and 12th, the peak of the Iran escalation, xyz traders were 31.1% of all active wallets on the exchange (37.5% on Mar 9), and crude stayed the largest xyz market by volume for two months after the spike.

SpaceX IPO (May 17th to June 30th): TradeXYZ listed their pre-IPO market on SpaceX a month before its official listing, becoming the leading place to trade the largest financial event in history ahead of its debut. This onboarded 68,765 traders with 37,653 of them brand new to the exchange, marking the first time that the majority of users came to Hyperliquid with an xyz market as their first ever trade. On June 12th, the official IPO date, xyz traders represented 50.5% of every active trader on the platform and SPCX alone had more unique traders than BTC that day (21,664 vs. 15,628).

AI & Memory Mania (July 1st to August 16th): As AI capex climbed, demand for memory compute became insatiable and companies that make it saw earnings estimates and valuations rerate violently higher. We saw 59,204 first-timers, 35,213 new, the highest share of any period at 60%. Semiconductor and memory names (led by SK Hynix, SanDisk and Micron) went from 4% of xyz volume in January to 60% in the last week of July. For five weeks from Jul 13, xyz was more than half of all perp volume on Hyperliquid, peaking at 62.5% in the week of Jul 27. The run ended in the week of Aug 17, when crypto volume nearly quadrupled while xyz volume held and xyz's share of the exchange fell from 53% to 25%.

These five catalysts brought a growing number of users to a platform they had never accessed before. Just under a year ago these contracts didn't exist, and now they represent a quarter of all open interest and volume on Hyperliquid.

In Part II we will dive deeper into the users, how they arrived on the platform, and what they trade and when.