Binance Is Eating Hyperliquid RWA Perps Lead, CoinMarketCap Researcher Warns, and the 400 Million USD Buyback Engine Behind HYPE May Pay the Price

Binance is pulling liquidity away from Hyperliquid’s RWA perps, Liu says

CoinMarketCap’s head of research, Alice Liu, has warned that Hyperliquid’s dominance in one of its fastest-growing markets is already eroding, and that the erosion strikes directly at the token-buyback engine behind HYPE’s record price run. Speaking to Cointelegraph on the Trade Secrets program, Liu said the launch of real-world-asset perpetual futures on Binance has moved both volume and liquidity to the world’s largest exchange at remarkable speed.

“Tokenization of the perps, people normally traded on Hyperliquid,” Liu said. “But since Binance started to launch the RWA perps, the volume and liquidity quickly moved to Binance.” Her estimate of the damage is stark: Binance now takes about 50 percent of the market share in perpetuals backed by tokenized stocks, tokenized ETFs and tokenized indices, a category Liu has been tracking for the past two months.

The comment lands at an uncomfortable moment for the decentralized perpetuals venue. Hyperliquid remains the clear leader among decentralized exchanges, and it is still, in Liu’s words, “a venue where a lot of the liquidity is getting aggregated, and a lot of the product’s scale is created there.” But the pattern she describes suggests that when a centralized giant copies a successful decentralized product, the liquidity that product attracted does not stay loyal to its inventor.

The buyback engine behind HYPE’s all-time high

HYPE recently hit an all-time high of 86 USD and is up roughly 47.5 percent over the past 30 days, trading near 80.49 USD at the time of writing, with a market capitalization of about 17.9 billion USD. Liu attributes much of that strength not to network activity itself but to Hyperliquid’s aggressive token buyback program, in which the project uses protocol revenue to repurchase its own token on the open market.

“Hype has spent over 400 million USD on token buybacks,” Liu noted. “So I think some of this price action momentum we’re seeing is supported by that as well.” Hyperliquid leads the entire crypto sector in buyback spending, and with only a small share of the token supply unlocked so far, the emissions schedule remains gradual, keeping floating supply tight while protocol purchases absorb even more of it.

That combination — revenue-funded buybacks plus a limited float — has produced one of the strongest token performances of the cycle. But Liu is explicit about the circularity at its center. The buybacks depend on trading activity generating fees, and the fees depend on Hyperliquid keeping the volumes that made it the breakout venue of the perpetuals boom.

“So, will we have enough activity on the network to generate the revenue to continue with the buybacks to support the price level?” Liu asked. “I think that’s one of the key things to watch.” In other words, if Binance and other centralized exchanges keep capturing the highest-growth perps niches, the revenue that funds the buybacks could thin out precisely when token unlocks are adding new supply to the market.

Bitcoin’s floor matters for the whole trade

Liu’s warning about Hyperliquid sits inside a broader, more constructive view of the market. She believes Bitcoin probably already bottomed when it fell to around 59,000 USD in June of this year, roughly 53 percent below its October all-time high of 126,100 USD. Bitcoin tapped 81,600 USD at the start of September, an approximately 28 percent rally from mid-August, before slipping back below the 80,000 USD level. It trades near 77,288 USD at the time of writing, down marginally over the past 24 hours.

That rebound was enough to push the CoinMarketCap Crypto Fear and Greed Index back into Greed territory after the gauge spent most of the year in Fear. Liu considers tokenized real-world assets and perpetual futures the two most interesting narratives outside Bitcoin itself — which is exactly why the fight over RWA perps market share matters beyond a single exchange rivalry.

Liu is colder on AI tokens

While she remains broadly constructive on Hyperliquid, Liu is notably cautious on the AI-crypto narrative, particularly the meme-ified AI tokens with little or no utility that surged in late 2023. “For the previous cycle meme-ified AI tokens that do not have any utility or infrastructure, and are purely just backing onto a concept — I think those could potentially go to zero,” she said.

Her reasoning is competitive rather than ideological. AI-focused cryptocurrencies now compete for the same investor attention as AI equities, memory-chip stocks and the wave of AI infrastructure companies. Even the “really solid” AI infrastructure projects in crypto, she acknowledged, are likely to get a price discount relative to their traditional-market peers simply because of the competition for capital.

On Bitcoin’s longer-term trajectory, Liu takes a middle path between Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, both of whom have predicted a 1 million USD Bitcoin by 2030. “Bitcoin to 500K by 2030,” she said with a laugh, adding that 1 million USD is not impossible but represents the bullish end of the range rather than her base case.

What it means for altcoin holders

For HYPE holders, the takeaway is a question of dependencies. The token’s all-time high rests on a buyback flywheel that converts trading revenue into sustained buying pressure. That flywheel works only as long as Hyperliquid keeps winning the volume war — and the first major skirmish over RWA perps has already gone substantially Binance’s way within months of the centralized exchange entering the category.

The decentralized venue still holds the DEX crown, its aggregation role remains intact, and gradual unlocks give the buyback program time to work. But Liu’s framing turns the HYPE thesis into a measurable question: watch the revenue, not the rhetoric. If protocol income keeps pace with buyback commitments, the flywheel holds. If centralized competitors keep skimming the highest-growth products, the market will eventually notice — and the token that led the buyback era will have to prove it can lead on activity alone.