Hyperliquid's Breakout Moment and Trades For 2026

I think the era of beta chasing in crypto is now solidly over. You can't just allocate to the top 10 assets in crypto and walk away. You have to be very selective with what you pick, in my personal opinion, and that's going to pay a lot of dividends. I think that Hyperliquid will eat commodities trading, and we're seeing the beginnings of it now. But even to Avi's point about crypto—finally, the tech is ready—it's finally having its moment. I think this is like the first pitch of the first inning of that moment.

Welcome, everyone. How's everyone feeling? Thanks for showing up today. Appreciate it.

I'm honored, guys. I always look forward to this the most when I'm invited on the 1000x live.

Well, we love having you here.

Welcome to our living room. It's also weird for me to see Jonah in person because normally I see him through the screen. Now I have to be next to him.

Yeah, I'm definitely worse in 3D, that's for sure.

But it's okay. A pretty crazy night. I just got here on a red-eye. The American transportation system is a little bit borderline right now, so it's a photo finish. But you made it here; that's the important thing. You're looking lovely, too, Jonah. I know that's what you're looking for here. You look lovely.

1. State of The Market

Thank you. It's ridiculous. Not only is there a war abroad, there's a war in the airports going on right now, too. It's crazy, actually, so I hope everybody gets home okay. Can we talk about these markets, actually?

Oh, you don't—you don't want to talk about it? We can. We can.

Yeah. Avi's already talking about his shareholder returns mustache, too. He always makes a joke every time we do this podcast that I have different facial hair, and it actually is true, so it's fair. I think it's more of a 70s porn-star mustache that you've got going on. But either way, let's talk about these markets, guys. I'm very curious to get your take. It's been really interesting over the last month, especially from the perspective that, now that we have the rise of platforms like Hyperliquid, we're starting to see this blending of crypto trading and oil contracts within our crypto-native space. Start from the 10,000-foot level: How should we be thinking about these markets today?

I think the last month in these markets has just been one of the most incredible times that I've seen since COVID. Right now, what we're seeing is a massive increase in volatility in the market since Trump was elected, and this past month has been the most volatile month that I've seen in terms of the things to pay attention to, with all of the different markets gyrating up and down. I think it hammers home the point that we're now in a different world. We're now in the world of the trader. We're now in the world of the speculator. We're in a world where it's very difficult to hold positions for 3 months, very easy to hold them for 3 minutes, and maybe easy again to hold them for 3 years.

What I've seen is that, for my entire trading career, I tended to hold positions anywhere from 2 to 6 months, maybe 7 or 8 months, and I think that time period has become very difficult because things are changing so quickly. Really, you have to make bets on what I call—or what everyone calls—mega-trends: things that you think are absolutely going to impact and change the world over the next 3 to 5 years. You just have to grit your teeth and hold through the volatility, or you have to be changing your mind on a dime as new information comes out.

If you're betting, "Hey, maybe there's a really quick rebound in software because AI fears are overblown," you buy the IGV ETF when it's trading at 81, it trades to 88, and you've got to get out, right? These things happen over the course of 10 to 14 days. One thing that I've been doing, and I'd encourage a lot of other people to do, is, when markets get extremely volatile, make sure you're placing your bets on the right timelines.

Yeah, timelines are important. I would take a slightly different tack than you on this one, Avi. I think it's easier to hold positions for a longer amount of time now because, if you're actively trading in an extremely volatile market, if a market is 3 times as volatile today as it was yesterday, you need 1/3 of the risk today to generate the same sort of P&L variance as you did yesterday. Positions get smaller when volatility increases, and that's important if you're actively trading and managing P&L daily, as you would as an active trader.

These are times where I don't feel like I have an edge as a daily trader. I feel like I have an edge as people panic and vomit out of good stuff because of what I perceive to be a temporary situation in Iran. I think it gives me good entry opportunities in the stuff that I like for the next 2 to 5 years. Markets are volatile now precisely because people aren't thinking about the next 2 to 5 years. They're thinking about surviving the next 15 minutes or 15 days.

So, timeline-wise, this is a great time to say, "Okay, Micron stock just vomited because of something—again, it's my view—I perceive it to be sort of transient in Iran. Let me stash that, and let me just hang on to it and try not to get stopped out of this or look at the volatility."

Yeah, I do agree that volatility gives you phenomenal entries on things that you might want to hold for that mega-trend. A great example is yesterday: Circle puked 20% on this GENIUS Act leak.

What happened there, by the way?

Yeah. Yesterday, there was a leak that, in the Clarity Act—which is a stablecoin act being looked at by Congress—you might not be able to give yield to the holders of your stablecoins, which is obviously a big draw. That's Circle's entire business: stablecoins. If the stablecoins can't generate yield for their end user, then that would be a big impact to their business, and Circle goes down 20%.

If your view is that stablecoins in 5 years are going to eat the financial system, that's an opportunity for you. That's an opportunity to get in the market. What Jonah and I are trying to say is that this market is extremely volatile, but that's giving you, the investor, the opportunity, if you're on top of the ball, to bet on these things that you think are absolutely going to play out over the next 3 to 5 years and get in at good prices today.

2. Hyperliquid’s Breakout Moment

That's really why I get exhilarated by these markets and why they're really fun for me, because it does also let you pay attention to a broad swath of things and try to say, "Okay, well, maybe we're going to get some amazing deals with semiconductor stocks. Maybe we're going to get some amazing deals with crypto." Just to go back to crypto for a second, it's been incredible to watch the last month really put crypto on the map in a way that it hasn't been before in the eyes of traditional finance.

I mean, the average person who works in traditional finance is now aware of Hyperliquid, because for the first time ever you're seeing a product that's crypto-native actually impact global markets. I mean, Trade XYZ, which is an app on top of Hyperliquid that allows you to trade traditional items like oil, gold, silver, and the S&P, traded 2% of global crude oil volumes. That's totally nuts. That was where I was going with this.

That's a crypto product that's accomplishing this. I'm seeing headlines now in The Wall Street Journal. I'm getting calls left and right about what's going on with this Hyperliquid thing. "Should I be taking a look at it?" It really hammers home the point that we've reached a stage with crypto where it is now genuinely valuable to the traditional financial system.

That's why a lot of you in this room probably come from that world and are looking at, "How do we integrate crypto with what we do now day to day?" We've finally reached that point. I got into this industry in 2017, and basically up until now, I don't think the technology was really there yet. The integrations weren't really there yet, and now they finally are. It's amazing to see, and it's also providing some pretty great investment opportunities.

Yeah, I think that's what I wanted to end on: Hyperliquid. Even for me as a watcher of this, watching the volume on, first, gold and then the CLUSD oil contract explode in the way that it did—you rarely see these flashbulb moments where you're like, "Wow, this is going to be a permanent and important thing." I think a huge part of that is the 24/7 nature.

And I guess just—

And perps.

And perps. But one part that's really interesting about this to me is that, on the one hand, from an architectural standpoint, this feels like a huge win for crypto: the 24/7 trading, perps being adopted by TradFi. On the other hand, what are people trading on Hyperliquid? It's not crypto. It's TradFi assets.

I've got a few comments on this. Let's talk about oil on Hyperliquid. As some of you may know, I've spent most of my career as a crude oil trader, and perps are the most effective instrument in the world to trade what we call flat price—just the directional price of crude oil.

Better than any dated future that you have on the CME or ICE. It's really amazing, and Hyperliquid's got that. Why is that structure preferential? Because you don't want to have to roll your futures. It's an annoyance, right?

Perps give you the same kind of leverage straight away, and you can just bet up or down on the front month without really needing to worry about expiry, rolling, the nuances of when to roll, physical delivery, or financial versus physical settlement. All of that nonsense is out the window with perps.

However, in order for Hyperliquid to really take off for commodities, they're going to have to add it. They're going to have to up their dated futures game because those time spreads are important to bring in this mega participant base of physical hedgers.

This is where I'm going somewhere interesting with this. I think that Hyperliquid will eat commodities trading, and we're seeing the beginnings of it now. But even to Avi's point about, “Whoa, crypto's finally—the tech is ready. It's finally having its moment,” I think this is like the first pitch of the first inning of that moment.

Why? Because even though it's kind of cool to watch oil perps trade on weekends, that's literally 1% of what's possible for just one commodity. You have to add the other dated futures.

So, how do we get there? How do we get Exxon and BP and Vitol hedging their oil risk on Hyperliquid? First, the world has to become stablecoinized, and these companies have to have treasury on-ramps and off-ramps for fiat to stablecoin, stablecoin to fiat.

Then, once that's in place, they can quickly trade on Hyperliquid effectively at institutional scale. It was Druckenmiller who recently said that the entire financial system—its back end—is going to get hot-swapped from old payment rails to stablecoins. That is the prerequisite, and Druckenmiller's never wrong.

Once that happens, I think you will see: if Hyperliquid is cool and exciting and seems like it's found product-market fit now, just wait until institutions get on there and do what they need to do. Then I think that'll be a moment when a lot of the older guard of trading—it'll be like the moment when the pit became obsolete.

That was sort of happening as I started my career. The guys shouting and screaming and waving pieces of paper just evaporated into thin air, and I think that'll happen with the futures exchanges, too. What do you think, Avi?

I think that's spot-on, and what I mean is, to me, that just makes it a really, really, really promising investment to go look at and figure out: okay, well, maybe I need to get—maybe I need to get on top of this right now because I think it is inevitable.

Anyone that traded both futures contracts on traditional exchanges and then on Hyperliquid can just—it's just so much easier, and it's also more fun. I've hyper-pilled a lot of my old commodities trading friends. When I first went into crypto professionally—I’ve dabbled in crypto personally for a long time—the general line of thinking was, “Jonah, you're out of your mind. What are you doing?”

You're crazy. And in some respects, they were right. 2022 was a little rough, but at the same time, now I get text messages like, “Jonah, you've created a beast. You know, what's going on?” Name redacted: “I've been on Hyperliquid all weekends. So fun, you know?”

A big part of what is also happening now, that was not happening at all before, is that I was working at a large traditional hedge fund for about 2.5 years, building out their digital asset practice. One of the things that we wanted to do was trade on-chain. We wanted to actually use these products, and it was really hard because there were a lot of regulatory compliance issues that we had to run into. There were a lot of KYC issues. A lot of these exchanges don't KYC.

But more importantly than that, when you're at a hedge fund, the goal of a hedge fund is to make money. If you're asking them to use a product, the question that they're going to ask you is, “Well, how much money are we going to make? How much risk am I willing to take to use this product?”

And if the answer is, “Well, not that much, because we're only going to use it to trade crypto, and that's really its only value: we're going to use it to pump meme coins that maybe we'll make a few million bucks on,” they're going to say, “Yeah, that doesn't really sound that great. I don't really want to take that risk of the SEC breathing down my throat because you wanted to buy farcoin. Not doing that. Sorry.”

Now that we're actually seeing traditional assets being traded at non-trivial volumes on these exchanges, that means there's actual pressure to get on. If you're not on those exchanges, you can't trade on the weekend. And so it becomes more difficult to trade on the weekend.

Not that you can't, but it becomes an actual competitive advantage for people to be able to trade on these exchanges. So now there's pressure. If you're not on them, you can't compete. You're not going to make as much money as you could.

Now that Trump loves to announce things heading into the weekend and after market hours so it doesn't impact the markets, it's actually a pretty nice edge if you're on Hyperliquid and you can go trade those things immediately. I think we're now moving from a world where there was a lot of risk to using crypto—in terms of reputational risk and actual operational risk—and there was a lot of hesitancy to actually integrate these products, to now there's a risk in the opposite way: if you don't use it, your business becomes obsolete.

Why didn't you hedge on the weekend? Really, you're starting to see things speed up, and I mean, this is mainly around back-end integrations with crypto. We can talk about the rest of the crypto market, which has been going through a pretty terrible time, but wherever you want to go, Avi, we should talk about that.

Just to back that up, I've been wondering how much of the value proposition of crypto is just that it's open 24/7 by default. I had a conversation about a year ago with a very large delta-neutral fund. I was trying to understand why people were depositing into Aave and getting less than treasuries. That was just not making very much sense to me, and they literally told me I was overthinking it.

If you have a strategy where you're arbitraging, it's actually a risk for you to have your capital locked up over the weekends or outside of banking hours, to the point where that's actually a greater risk than the smart-contract risk that you're taking with Aave.

And also, if you just think about it from the perspective of especially a delta-neutral hedge fund, which kind of clips—picks up pennies—if I'm only picking up pennies 5 out of 7 days of the week, I can literally increase my profit—my revenue—by...

35%.

I have a lot of thoughts on this. I'll just give you a quick sound bite because our time is limited here. I would say 24/7 is a value-add for crypto, not because it's some special crypto-native feature. Theoretically, the CME could just go 24/7, too. The problem is it's extremely hard for them to do so.

So it's less about crypto and more about TradFi having this immense amount of tech debt. We used to try to interact with the CME's tech team to enable this or that feed, and sometimes it would literally be like, “Please, we want to buy this from you. Take our money.” And they're like, more often than not, “We can't. We have to go back to engineering. There's this whole process.”

3. Crypto’s Next Era

Meanwhile, crypto is pretty slick user-interface-wise. You're getting it. I think this is an interesting moment in time because, finally, the merging of TradFi and crypto is happening in a real way.

This has been, arguably, DAS. We were early to this idea as a conference. It's really happening now. There's just so much to talk about. But it's also interesting because crypto participants have largely started to assume that TradFi is going to come in and win all the value in the market.

But then, if you're to look historically and say, “Okay, what you're describing is an actual tech improvement, and you have an old industry with a lot of money. Also, it's been highly regulated, so maybe it's a little bit slower-moving, not quite as innovative as it could be. How often do you get an old industry combined with an industry built on a tech upgrade, and the old industry subsumes all the value?”

It probably isn't impossible, but I would guess that that's a massive anomaly when it comes to history and business. So it's just—we're having this conference, I think, at an interesting moment in time where there's an assumption that's counter to what the historical trend would suggest.

It's going on in AI, though.

The way that I think about it is actually very similar to what happened in the dot-com boom, right? There are a ton of internet-native companies that come out and capture a sizeable amount of value, but of course every company generates value from using the internet.

Every company—even down to restaurants—can now be booked on their website. Or Domino's integrates the internet and grows massively even though it's a pizza company.

Yeah. Right?

And so, obviously, there are companies that are going to generate tremendous value from integrating crypto, but there will also be crypto-native companies because they understand the technology and are able to use it more effectively, that are going to grow to even new heights.

Companies like Coinbase, companies like Circle, potentially companies like Kraken. These guys have people who really understand how to integrate and use the technology right now. I think once the psychology of your average, everyday person shifts and they're able to use crypto in a more seamless fashion and are more comfortable doing that, these companies can really start to grow at an even more exponential rate.

There are really, in my opinion, three value adds of crypto and blockchain technology in general. I've been very consistent on this from the beginning. It's that you're able to move value around without anybody stopping you and at any time of day.

Yeah, right?

And that's really the core of it. So anytime I come across something that's crypto-related, I ask these questions: Does it hit at least one of these? Are you able to move value around more easily? Are you able to move your value around without anybody stopping you? And are you able to move your value around at any time you want? And that's really, I think, the core value add of blockchain technology. It has to hit at least one of those.

One other additional piece of it is that now it's really easy because if everyone's using the same underlying financial technology, it's very easy to mix and match and have underpinnings and integrations between two separate companies or two separate assets. That makes things a lot easier. Just building out new companies using financial architecture becomes easier.

Hyperliquid's a great example of this. A lot of people don't know this about Hyperliquid, but Hyperliquid is actually a base-layer blockchain that allows other people to build applications on top of it that resemble exchanges. Anybody can build an exchange on top of Hyperliquid using its underlying technology. If you want to go spin up a Nasdaq competitor, you can do it in about 3.5 seconds.

So, quickly, I think the way that these technological revolutions are tradable, and the way that these trades and opportunities that Avi just alluded to manifest themselves in a way that we can all profit from, is that you have the old world and the new world, and there's kind of a K-shaped price-action pattern going on in both the old world and the new world.

AI is a great analog. New technology shows up. OpenAI and Anthropic go parabolic. The 100,000 AI wrapper companies that tried to get funded—a lot of them, most of them, went straight to zero. A lot of VC dollars got evaporated there quietly and humiliatingly.

On the traditional side, you have 30- or 35-year-old graphics-card companies like Nvidia becoming the most valuable company in the world because of AI. This is the TradFi of AI trading up to basically infinity. Then you have a bunch of other companies like Chegg getting totally disrupted.

There's no rule that says, “Hey, TradFi's screwed and crypto's the future.”

Yeah.

I think we're seeing that K-shaped price action in TradFi. I wouldn't want to be sitting on Fidelity's business right now, or Schwab's, but Robinhood and Coinbase are going to do really well—one from the old world, one from the new world. I think a lot of tokens are going straight to zero. Hyperliquid won't; neither will Bitcoin. They're going straight up. So, yeah, K-shaped in both worlds.

That's actually been one of the greatest trades I think I've ever seen in the history of markets: the absolute decimation of tokens. Getting short, basically up until 2 years ago, was a great trade. Everything in crypto was built off of narrative. Nothing was actually making real revenue and making real money, and a lot of these companies were raising at fantastical valuations based on some high-in-the-sky dream that maybe one day they could make $2 of revenue.

I think what we've realized now is that most of these things are actually not going to pan out. But before, when this happened in 2017 and nothing really panned out and everything died, there wasn't anything to point to and say, “Hey, but that worked.” So maybe it all died because it wasn't very good. People would just cope and say, “No, it all died because the entire industry fell apart, and it's all going to come back.”

Now what we have is actual products that we can point to and say, “Hey, these things have done really well.” Sky, which is a rebrand of MakerDAO that issues stablecoins, is up 25% this year while everything else is down. Hyperliquid is up this year while everything else is down. Bittensor—the TAO—is up this year while everything else is down.

There's a lot more dispersion in the market, and dispersion is very healthy because it means that we're finally separating the winners from the losers. I think the era of beta chasing in crypto is now solidly over. You can't just allocate to the top 10 assets in crypto and walk away. You have to be very selective with what you pick, in my personal opinion, and that is going to pay a lot of dividends.

Now you have to start evaluating each individual crypto project as a company. Does it generate value? Does it generate revenue? Is it going to grow exponentially over the next 3 to 5 years? Really think about it in the same way that you would evaluate an equity investment. You're very unlikely to go buy a company that literally makes zero revenue, right? It's probably not going to happen.

I could not agree more with you. I think that is the thing that changed, and I think the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act are accelerating that.

What you've never had in crypto is—even if you look at tech as an analog here—did most people make money during the dot-com bubble, or did they make money during the slow grind up, 25 years of up-only tech companies?

You'd rather be in the slow grind up. Now we've laid the groundwork where you can build a stablecoin company. Everyone is pretty sure that this is going to subsume a huge part of finance. You have sectors like what's happening with Hyperliquid, but also prediction markets.

You have these options that you didn't have before where, okay, maybe you're not going to make 1,000x your money, but you're probably going to do really well. So suddenly, those kinds of narrative-based trades that no one really believed in anymore—I agree. I don't think those are ever coming back because you have better alternatives.

Well, I don't want to say they'll never come back because I always put my foot in my mouth when this happens. At some point, Bitcoin goes up like 50%, and then everyone comes flooding back into the market and starts buying dog coins again. It always does come back to some extent.

Inevitably, I'll say, “I think meme coins are over,” and then in 3 weeks something like Pepe goes up 100%, and I get 300 hate DMs on Twitter. So I'm like, “Okay, you know what? It'll probably come back at some point. I just don't necessarily think it's a smart investment.”

I've gotten a few hate DMs on our Twitter recently, for oil. I mean, put it this way: I think your general point is what we as traders and profit seekers should be focused on, which is that you make more money on a mega-trend than you do dancing between the raindrops, trying to get in and out of stuff every 15 seconds.

We are on the cusp of a very special type of supercycle in crypto. We've been talking about the crypto supercycle for a long time now. It's usually alluded to Bitcoin. Yeah. I believe Stan Druckenmiller. In Stan I trust, right? The supercycle is the back end of finance getting hot-swapped for stablecoins.

Once everybody's banking rails and money are stablecoinized, if you open an “Aerobora” bank account—the new Palmer Lucky vehicle—you can send wires or send USDC or do whatever you want. Receive, send. Once that Erebor model goes global, there's literally nothing stopping every single institution in this city and beyond from trading on Hyperliquid and trading on-chain because it's just better and it's always on.

It's faster, and you don't have to lock up capital. In a world with nonzero interest rates, T-plus—every millisecond of settlement time—adds another I don't know how many millions or billions of dollars of losses from just inertia on the settlement-time point.

I want to end with a rapid-fire round of questions for you guys, but I think people got one thing right and one thing wrong. Remember, people would talk about owning your assets and owning your data. But there is something powerful, I think, within finance about you as an owner—from the entity that legally owns the stock—and there's a huge amount of money getting made on the float in the meantime.

The more that I think about stablecoins and what crypto does, the more I think that now the ownership actually sits with you as the holder of a stablecoin, which also means: Where does that yield go? Just for people thinking through that, there are a lot of implications to that, but I'm starting to think that's a more and more important point.

100%. If it's in your MetaMask or if it's in your wallet, you own it. And that, I think, is a very important point.

4. Trades For 2026

And it’s not about this kind of—you can squint at it as data sovereignty. It’s literally the yield, right? Every dollar, every asset generates yield in the financial system. The intermediaries that were doing you the favor of holding it were making that yield instead of you. I think that’s the important point to get.

Okay, we have 2 minutes left here. I want to do a rapid-fire. We’ve been talking about some projects in crypto, token sectors. What’s interesting to you guys these days? Maybe the world is smaller, maybe there are fewer good teams, sectors, assets. What’s piquing your interest?

I think the world is just smaller. Basically, what I’m trying to do is figure out exactly: How do I bet on stablecoins, and how do I bet on 24/7? And also, I’m very bullish on Bitcoin. That’s really it.

When it comes to stablecoins, my answers are Sky, which is a crypto project, Circle, and Coinbase.

Mm-hmm. When it comes to 24/7 trading, I’m very constructive on Robinhood and very constructive on Hyperliquid. And then when it comes to Bitcoin, well, it’s Bitcoin. I echo everything Avi just said. We agree wholeheartedly on that one.

I would say the sort of contrarian angle I’m looking at is that I was kind of bearish on Canton, and now I’m not. I think that may be a very good angle to play into the themes Avi just alluded to.

Super interesting. What do you think of the money-market-fund-like constructs, like Morpho and Aave?

I really like them. I think I’m nervous just because we’ve had quite a few DeFi hacks recently.

Yeah. And I think that right now, what we’re seeing is obviously a move towards centralization.

Yeah. And the whole concept of a decentralized money market, I think, still gives people some heart palpitations.

For me, I think it’s still valuable, but I view a lot of these products the same way that I view self-driving cars, which is that it’s so obviously an improvement on what we currently have, and it will cause far fewer crashes and far fewer deaths in the future. And the biggest barrier is going to be human psychology—to allow people to basically allow these things in every city.

DeFi is hanging in the balance. It’s in Washington. It’s in their hands. I think the yield is either going via Aave or direct via USDC.

I agree. Guys, this has been a ton of fun. Appreciate you doing this.