🏛️ Wall Street Gets Its Second HYPE Fund
The race to bring Hyperliquid to traditional investors is accelerating. Bitwise Asset Management, the San Francisco-based crypto manager with $11 billion in client assets, is set to launch the Bitwise Hyperliquid ETF (ticker: BHYP) on the New York Stock Exchange this Friday. The fund arrives just days after 21Shares debuted THYP on the Nasdaq on May 12, marking the first U.S. product offering direct exposure to HYPE, Hyperliquid’s native token. BHYP becomes the second spot Hyperliquid fund to hit U.S. markets and the first to trade on the NYSE, giving traditional investors a familiar brokerage-accessible vehicle to gain exposure to one of crypto’s fastest-growing decentralized exchanges. For retail traders who have watched HYPE surge in recent months, this development marks a meaningful shift in how the asset can be held and tracked inside standard investment accounts.
⚡ Why Hyperliquid Is Attracting This Much Attention
Hyperliquid is not a typical decentralized exchange. The platform has established itself as the dominant on-chain perpetuals venue, commanding over 50% of all DEX perpetual open interest and processing roughly $8 billion in daily trading volume. It has handled more than $4 trillion in cumulative volume since launch, and its trading fees generate roughly $56 million per month, with more than 95% of that funneled into daily open-market HYPE buybacks. The platform is also expanding beyond perpetuals into tokenized commodities and spot crypto trading. Its February 2026 moment drew particular notice when, during a Sunday geopolitical flare-up while traditional markets were closed, Bloomberg cited Hyperliquid’s crude oil contract as the most relevant price available in the market. That kind of real-world relevance is rare for a decentralized protocol and helps explain why major asset managers are competing to wrap it in an ETF structure.
📊 HYPE’s Market Position Right Now
The HYPE token is trading up over 13% at the time of the Bitwise announcement, with a market capitalization of approximately $10.5 billion. That places it as the ninth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap when stablecoins are excluded, and it consistently ranks within the top 15 tokens by trading volume. The token launched in November 2024 at around $7.56 and has posted a return of roughly 900% from that launch price, reaching an all-time high of $59.33 in September 2025. Year-to-date through early May 2026, HYPE has gained approximately 44% on a quarterly basis, meaningfully outperforming major cryptocurrencies. For investors who missed the early move, the availability of a regulated ETF wrapper changes the calculus by removing the need to manage self-custody wallets, exchange accounts, or private keys. That accessibility premium is precisely what Bitwise and its competitors are banking on.
🏁 A Three-Way Race Among Asset Managers
Bitwise was the first asset manager to file a Form S-1 for a Hyperliquid ETF back in September, but 21Shares and Grayscale quickly followed with their own filings. 21Shares won the race to market, with THYP trading on the Nasdaq and recording $1.8 million in trading volume and approximately $1.2 million in net inflows on its first day. Analysts described the debut as a solid start, though well below blockbuster recent launches like the Bitwise Solana ETF, which posted $56 million in first-day volume when it launched in October 2025. THYP carries a 0.30% management fee. Bitwise’s BHYP will charge a 0.34% sponsor fee, with the fee waived entirely for the first month on BHYP’s first $500 million in assets. Grayscale has not yet announced a launch date for its own product, meaning the competitive window is still open for both early entrants to build a user base before the market gets more crowded.
💰 The Staking Angle That Sets BHYP Apart
The feature that most distinguishes BHYP from peers is its approach to staking. Bitwise has announced that BHYP will be the first U.S. fund to offer Hyperliquid staking rewards to shareholders, delivered through its in-house division called Bitwise Onchain Solutions. This means investors holding BHYP in a brokerage account could earn yield from protocol staking activity without ever touching a crypto wallet. 21Shares has also indicated it plans to stake a significant portion of its HYPE holdings within THYP, using Figment as its staking provider with a roughly 70/30 reward split in favor of the trust. For income-oriented investors or advisors building diversified crypto allocations, staking yield embedded inside an ETF is a genuinely new structural feature that did not exist in earlier single-asset products like Bitcoin or Ethereum ETFs. Bitwise Onchain Solutions has been expanding its staking capabilities across multiple assets, and the Hyperliquid product appears to be among its more prominent deployments.
🎯 What This Means for Investors Watching the Space
The broader backdrop for BHYP is a crypto ETF market that has staged a strong recovery in 2026. Spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in nearly $2 billion in net inflows during April alone, the strongest monthly performance since October 2025. Total assets under management across crypto funds rose to $155 billion as of late April, and Bitwise projects more than 100 crypto-linked ETFs could launch in the United States during 2026. Against that backdrop, a spot HYPE ETF with embedded staking fills a specific gap: it packages a high-growth DeFi infrastructure asset with protocol-level yield inside a familiar product structure. Investors should note that BHYP, like THYP, is structured as a non-Investment Company Act 1940 product, meaning it does not carry the same regulatory protections as standard mutual funds or 40-Act ETFs. That distinction matters for risk assessment. For those comfortable with the risk profile and the underlying protocol, BHYP represents one of the more direct institutional-grade on-ramps to the Hyperliquid ecosystem currently available in U.S. markets.
Sources
https://www.theblock.co/post/401384/bitwise-hyperliquid-etf-to-start-trading-on-nyse-this-friday
https://unchainedcrypto.com/21shares-launches-thyp-and-txxh-on-nasdaq-the-first-u-s-etfs-tracking-hyperliquid/
https://cryptopotato.com/21shares-hyperliquid-etf-debuts-with-1-8m-in-trading-volume/
https://www.coinlore.com/coin/hyperliquid
https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260501sf48184/bitwise-announces-updates-to-etf-lineup
https://www.blockchain-council.org/cryptocurrency/crypto-analysis-2026-bitcoin-etfs-regulation-trends/
https://bitwiseinvestments.com/newsroom/bitwise-launches-spot-avalanche-etp-bava
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