DefiLlama's Hyperliquid page carries a one-line description of where trading fees end up: 99% of them, it says, reach the Assistance Fund that pays for the Hyperliquid buyback. The same page's own numbers, pulled Sunday evening, disagree with that label. Fees over the previous 24 hours came to $624,107. Revenue, the slice that actually reaches HYPE holders, came to $378,920. Sixty-one cents on the dollar.
That single day is noise on its own. The month behind it is not.
Thirty days of fees left about a third behind
Over the 30 days to Sunday, DefiLlama has the protocol booking $47.14 million in fees against $32.73 million in revenue. Roughly 69 cents of every fee dollar landed with holders. Annualised, the same tracker puts Hyperliquid on $1.012 billion in fees and $762.32 million in revenue, a spread of about $250 million a year that never touches the Hyperliquid buyback. The perps book alone shows the same shape, with $45.65 million in fees over 30 days against $31.81 million in revenue, which is where nearly all of the shortfall sits.
In May this site counted $51 million returned to token holders in 30 days. The comparable window now reads $32.73 million. The share has slipped too: an earlier Coinliva piece described HYPE as the top-15 token with 97% of revenue going back to holders, which was accurate when almost every fee came from markets the protocol ran itself.
Deployers may keep up to half the fees on their own markets
The cause is written into the product documentation. Hyperliquid's docs state that spot and HIP-3 perp deployers "may choose to keep up to 50% of trading fees generated by their deployed assets", with a further configurable share on top of that. Running one of those venues requires 500,000 HYPE staked, close to $27 million at Sunday's price, and the same docs describe fees as directed to the community rather than to any single pot.
Builder-deployed markets were around 2% of perp volume at the start of 2026. CoinDesk put them near half of it this month, with trade.xyz sitting behind more than 90% of the open interest in that category. DefiLlama's quarter-to-date breakdown lists $56.92 million from perps, $1.32 million from the spot orderbook, and $6.76 million from builder codes, which are passed straight through.
None of that is hidden. It just means the volume headline and the Hyperliquid buyback have stopped moving together, in the way Coinbase's trading revenue slid to about $5 million a day while its user numbers held.
The buyback has roughly halved since last summer
Quarterly revenue peaked near $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 by CoinDesk's count, then fell in each quarter after: $295 million, $217 million, $202 million. The Hyperliquid buyback followed it down, from about $290 million in that peak quarter to roughly $149 million in the second quarter of 2026. Around 44.5 million HYPE have been retired since the programme began.
Supply keeps arriving on the other side. Close to 10 million HYPE unlocked on August 6 against a circulating 222.4 million, and monthly unlocks run into 2027. Total supply stands at 955.3 million against a 1 billion cap, so the schedule still has plenty left to deliver. CoinGecko had HYPE at $54.51 on Sunday, a market cap near $12.1 billion, about 29% below the $76.87 record set on June 16. A buyback funded by a shrinking cut of a flat fee base has to work harder every month, which is the same arithmetic that leaves Lido's buyback needing $109,000 a day before it fires.
The trading itself looks healthy. ARK Invest's Lorenzo Valente counted $25.1 billion of tokenized stock and commodity volume in the week to July 19, 52% of the platform total, the first week where real-world assets beat crypto on the venue. Single stocks made up 61% of that. Thin books remain the weak point in these products, as they were when a single share set the price of a $407 million SK Hynix perp market.
Watch the September quarter close. If builder-deployed markets keep taking share while total fees stay flat, the Hyperliquid buyback shrinks again on a chart that still shows record open interest, and the 61% reading stops looking like a bad day. DefiLlama publishes both series daily, so the gap is checkable without waiting for a quarterly report.
