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  • 💸 The Weekend Trade Just Crossed $4 Billion

💸 The Weekend Trade Just Crossed $4 Billion

PLUS: Governments are quietly building a global stablecoin firewall

The Weekend Trade Just Crossed $4 Billion

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets closed above $4 billion in open interest this weekend, the first time they've hit that mark. A month ago the figure was $3.67 billion. At the start of the year it was $259 million, so the climb works out to roughly 1,454% in seven months. The record landed on a Saturday, with Nasdaq and the CME both closed.

What is HIP-3?
Hyperliquid is a crypto exchange that runs entirely on-chain, with no company holding your funds in the middle.

HIP-3 is an upgrade that lets outside developers launch their own perpetual futures markets on top of Hyperliquid's infrastructure, covering crypto, individual stocks, indices, commodities like oil and gold, and currencies. Launching one requires staking 500,000 HYPE tokens, currently worth tens of millions of dollars.

A perpetual future, or perp, lets traders bet on an asset's price with leverage and no expiration date. Because it all runs on a blockchain rather than a traditional exchange, these markets don't close for weekends or holidays.

Where the volume was already coming from

Talos found this pattern back in June: nearly half of S&P 500 perp volume and over 60% of oil perp volume happens outside US market hours. That was before this weekend's record. Traders had already built the habit of using these markets when nothing else was open, this was just the number catching up.

Nearly all of it runs through one deployer

Trade[XYZ], built by Hyperliquid's own tokenization arm, holds roughly 90% or more of total HIP-3 open interest, and that share has grown as the total has grown.

A handful of smaller deployers split what's left. Every listing decision, oracle choice, and risk parameter for almost all of that exposure sits with one team. Ten months since launch, nobody else has built a real second option at scale.

ICE has already taken this to regulators

ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher has met with Hyperliquid's team several times, and at a Bernstein conference in May he called the platform bigger than NASDAQ. His argument: under existing law, these perpetual contracts function as swaps, which means registration, reporting, and margining requirements under Dodd-Frank.

ICE runs its own exchange under that full regulatory weight and wants to know why an unregistered, foreign-incorporated venue doesn't have to. He wasn't asking regulators to shut Hyperliquid down. He was asking why ICE can't offer the same products, or why Hyperliquid shouldn't face the same rules.

Weeks later, the CFTC approved Kalshi to list Bitcoin perpetual futures, one sign that gap is starting to close.

What this weekend actually settles

Whether people want 24-hour leveraged exposure to stocks and commodities isn't really in question anymore. $4 billion, built almost entirely on weekend and off-hours trading, answers that. What's still open is how long one unregistered operator keeps supplying nearly all of it.

1️⃣ Sanders warns AI chiefs to pause development or face the Senate

Bernie Sanders sent OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta an ultimatum: pause AI development, or he'll push Congress to force it. The letter names Altman, Amodei, and Zuckerberg directly, reminding them of past promises to halt work if things got too risky.

Timing isn't random, Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 recently broke out of a test environment, and OpenAI and Anthropic models reportedly tried slipping malicious code into an open-source project using fake identities. Axios says the bill has little chance in this Congress. This is pressure, not law.

2️⃣ Governments are quietly building a global stablecoin firewall

Regulators in Washington, London, Brussels, and Hong Kong are converging on one idea: control stablecoins at the on- and off-ramps, same as banks. Treasury paired new GENIUS Act rules with sanctions on exchanges accused of aiding Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

The UK split issuers into ordinary and "systemic" tiers. The EU already proved the model works: MiCA pushed USDT out while USDC gained share, no broader market damage. A Banca d'Italia test found the blockchain leg of a cross-border transfer costs under half a percent of the total. Everything else, and every point of control, sits at the ramps.

3️⃣ Galaxy warns supply cuts alone won’t reprice ETH or SOL

Galaxy Research says demand will move ETH and SOL prices more than supply cuts will, but both chains are cutting issuance anyway. Ethereum's EIP-8363 would burn validator rewards to zero once half of ETH is staked; it missed the cutoff for the next upgrade, and 99.77% of surveyed validators oppose it.

Solana's further along: SIMD-0550 would pull its terminal inflation rate forward from 2032 to 2029, and SIMD-0553 could take daily SOL burns from $47,000 to $650,000. Both cleared Solana's threshold for a vote due August 22.

Are you watching?

Quantum’s first crypto victims may not know they’ve been hacked

The next blow to the crypto market could trigger without an identifiable perpetrator and no apparent compromise. Christopher Smith, the CEO and co-founder of blockchain firm Quantus Network, reportedly suggested that a signal that a quantum computer has compromised the crypto security used in major blockchains may be a succession of wallet thefts that cannot be explained.

The market may discover what happened only when funds from supposedly secured wallets start to move.

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