Hyperliquid's Breakout Moment and Trades For 2026

Summary

• The era of beta chasing in crypto is “now solidly over,” per Avi Felman: the alt-token decimation was “one of the greatest trades… in the history of markets,” and what’s left is healthy dispersion — Sky up 25% this year, Hyperliquid and Bittensor’s TAO up while everything else is down. The new discipline is evaluating each token as a company: “you’re very unlikely to go buy a company that literally makes zero revenue.”
• Hyperliquid is starting to eat commodities trading — trade XYZ, an app built on it, traded 2% of global crude oil volumes, and Avi Felman, a career crude trader, says perps beat any dated future on CME or ICE for flat-price oil. But this is “the first pitch of the first inning”: getting Exxon, BP, and Vitol hedging on-chain requires dated futures for time spreads plus stablecoinized corporate treasuries first.
• The macro regime is “the world of the trader”: Avi says positions are “very easy to hold for 3 minutes and very hard to hold for 3 months and maybe easy again to hold for 3 years,” so bet mega trends on 3–5 year horizons. Jonah’s twist: volatility is his entry mechanism — buy when people “panic and vomit out of good stuff,” like Micron on transient Iran fears or Circle’s 20% puke on the Clarity Act yield leak.
• The institutional risk calculus has inverted: it used to be SEC/reputational risk to touch crypto; now not being on-chain means you can’t trade weekends — a real edge when “Trump loves to announce things heading into the weekend.” A large delta-neutral fund’s math: going from clipping pennies five days a week to seven is +35% revenue, which is why depositing into Aave below treasury yields isn’t irrational.
• Jonah’s market map is K-shaped in both worlds, like AI (OpenAI/Anthropic and Nvidia up, wrapper companies and Chegg to zero): “I wouldn’t want to be sitting on Fidelity’s business right now or Schwab,” Robinhood and Coinbase win, and “a lot of tokens are going straight to zero. Hyperliquid won’t, neither will Bitcoin.”
• 2026 positioning, rapid-fire: Avi plays stablecoins via Sky, Circle, and Coinbase; 24/7 trading via Robinhood and Hyperliquid; plus Bitcoin. Jonah echoes all of it, adding one contrarian flip — “I was kind of bearish Canton, now I’m not.” The supercycle thesis underneath: finance’s back end gets “hot swapped” to stablecoins — “Druckenmiller’s never wrong.”
• The unresolved risk: “DeFi hangs in the balance. It’s in Washington.” Avi likes on-chain money markets (Morpho, Aave) but recent hacks make him nervous — his analogy is self-driving cars, obviously better but gated on human psychology.

Deep dive

1. “The world of the trader” — same volatility, two opposite playbooks

• Avi’s read: the last month was “one of the most incredible times” he’s seen “basically since COVID,” and he calls it the most volatile month he’s seen since Trump’s election — “we are now in the world of the trader… the speculator.” His whole career he held positions 2–6 months; that window has become very difficult — “very easy to hold them for 3 minutes and very hard to hold them for 3 months and maybe easy again to hold them for 3 years.” The answer is mega trends you’ll hold 3–5 years — or flipping on a dime: buy the IGV software ETF at 81 on overblown AI fears, it trades to 88, “you got to get out” — all inside 10–14 days.
• Jonah’s counter draws the opposite conclusion: if the market is 3x as volatile, you need 1/3 the risk for the same P&L variance, so daily-trading edge shrinks. His edge is buying when people “panic and vomit out of good stuff” over what he perceives as a transient Iran situation — stash Micron after it pukes, “try not to get stopped out,” because everyone else is “surviving the next 15 minutes or 15 days,” not thinking 2–5 years out.
• The shared specimen: Circle down 20% on a leaked Clarity Act provision that could bar paying yield to stablecoin holders — Circle’s entire business. Avi’s frame: if you believe stablecoins “in 5 years are going to eat the financial system,” that puke is your entry.

2. Hyperliquid’s flashbulb moment — “first pitch of the first inning”

• The stat that put crypto on tradfi’s map, per Avi: trade XYZ, an app on Hyperliquid, traded 2% of global crude oil volumes — Wall Street Journal headlines, “calls left and right.” His verdict after being in since 2017: “I don’t think the technology was really there yet… and now they finally are.”
• Avi, a career crude oil trader, introduces the oil-perps case; Jonah Van Bourg says perps are “the most effective instrument in the world” for flat-price crude — better than any dated future on CME or ICE, because rolling, expiry, and physical-versus-financial settlement “all of that nonsense is out the window.”
• But the call has a missing piece: Hyperliquid must “up their dated futures game,” because time spreads are what bring in physical hedgers — “How do we get Exxon and BP and Vitol hedging their oil risk on hyperliquid?” Prerequisite: the world gets stablecoinized and corporate treasuries get fiat on/off-ramps. He leans on Druckenmiller’s call that finance’s back end gets “hot swapped from old payment rails to stablecoins” — “and Druckenmiller’s never wrong.” End state: futures exchanges go the way of the trading pit, whose paper-waving shouters “just evaporated into thin air.”

3. The risk has flipped: staying off-chain is now the career risk

• Avi spent 2.5 years building a digital-asset practice at a large traditional hedge fund; the blockers were regulatory/KYC friction and the risk/reward pitch — if on-chain only buys meme-coin exposure, the answer is “I don’t really want to take that risk of the SEC breathing down my throat because you wanted to buy farcoin.” With real assets trading at non-trivial volume, the pressure inverts: if you’re not on these exchanges, you can’t trade the weekend — and “Trump loves to announce things heading into the weekend.”
• The 24/7 math, from Jonah’s conversation with a large delta-neutral fund: depositing into Aave below treasury yields isn’t overthinking-worthy — weekend capital lockup is a bigger risk than Aave’s smart-contract risk, and clipping pennies seven days instead of five is +35% revenue.
• Jonah’s demystification: 24/7 isn’t crypto-native magic — “theoretically the CME could just go 24/7, too.” It’s tradfi tech debt: his desk would beg CME’s tech team, “Please, we want to buy this from you. Take our money,” and the answer was “We can’t. We have to go back to engineering.”

4. Who captures the value — K-shaped in both worlds

• Avi’s contrarian setup: crypto participants now assume tradfi comes in and wins everything, but an old, regulated industry subsuming all the value from a genuine tech upgrade “would, he guesses, be a massive anomaly” historically.
• Avi’s dot-com analog: internet natives captured huge value and every incumbent benefited — Domino’s grew massively “even though it’s a pizza company” — so crypto natives like Coinbase, Circle, potentially Kraken compound alongside integrators. His three-question filter for anything crypto: does it move value more easily, without anybody stopping you, at any time of day? And Hyperliquid is a base-layer chain anyone can build exchanges on — “spin up a Nasdaq competitor… in about 3 and a half seconds.”
• Jonah’s price-action version: K-shaped in both worlds, like AI — OpenAI and Anthropic parabolic while “100,000 AI wrapper companies… went straight to zero,” 35-year-old Nvidia becomes the most valuable company while Chegg gets disrupted. Translated: “I wouldn’t want to be sitting on Fidelity’s business right now or Schwab,” Robinhood and Coinbase do well, and “a lot of tokens are going straight to zero. Hyperliquid won’t, neither will Bitcoin. They’re going straight up.”

5. “The era of beta chasing in crypto is now solidly over”

• Avi calls the token decimation “one of the greatest trades I’ve ever seen in the history of markets.” The difference from 2017’s wipeout: back then “people would just cope” and blame the whole industry dying; now there are winners to point to — Sky (the MakerDAO rebrand) up 25% this year, Hyperliquid up, Bittensor’s TAO up, while everything else is down. “Dispersion is very healthy because it means we’re finally separating the winners from the losers.”
• The new discipline: you “can’t just allocate to the top 10 assets and walk away” — evaluate each project as a company, on revenue and 3–5 year growth, “the same way that you would evaluate an equity investment.” Jonah adds the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts are accelerating this, and the dot-com lesson that the real money was the “slow grind up” over 25 years, not the bubble.
• Avi’s hedge, kept as hedged: he won’t say meme coins never come back — every time he declares them over, “in 3 weeks something like Pepe goes up 100% and I get like 300 hate DMs.” “It’ll probably come back at some point. I just don’t necessarily think it’s a smart investment.”

6. The 2026 book — and DeFi’s fate sits in Washington

• Avi’s rapid-fire positioning: stablecoins via Sky, Circle, and Coinbase; 24/7 trading via Robinhood and Hyperliquid; “and then when it comes to Bitcoin, well, it’s Bitcoin.” Jonah: “I echo everything Avi just said,” plus the contrarian angle — “I was kind of bearish Canton, now I’m not.”
• Jonah’s supercycle mechanics: once the “Aerobora” bank model — the new Palmer Lucky vehicle, with wires, USDC, or Tether from an account — goes global, “there’s literally nothing stopping every single institution in this city and beyond from trading on Hyperliquid.”
• On DeFi money markets (the Morphos and Aaves): Avi likes them but is “nervous just because we’ve had quite a few DeFi hacks recently.” His analogy: like self-driving cars, “so obviously an improvement” that will cause far fewer crashes — but “the biggest barrier is going to be human psychology.” The episode’s closing verdict: “DeFi hangs in the balance. It’s in Washington. It’s in their hands.”
• Jonah’s parting structural point: stablecoins move ownership — and the float yield intermediaries used to earn — to the holder. “If it’s in your MetaMask or if it’s in your wallet, you own it”; Avi says the yield flows “either via Aave or direct via USDC.”