Why Michaël van de Poppe Sees $100 for HYPE | Markets Outlook

Michaël van de Poppe made his HYPE price call while Hyperliquid was printing a new all-time high, targeting $100 or more in the near term. He compares HYPE's valuation to Solana and describes current PE ratios as super undervalued given the platform's growth rate. Two HYPE ETFs launched in the United States the day before recording, which he says is already channeling institutional money into the token. European professional traders, including those in the Netherlands, have migrated to Hyperliquid because trading perpetuals is nearly impossible on most venues under European regulation, creating a structural demand base. Hyperliquid's expansion into pre-IPOs, tokenized stocks, and tokenized commodities further accelerates the tokenization narrative in his view, and he highlights that HYPE is highly uncorrelated to the rest of the crypto market, making it useful for volatility trading strategies.

His caveats on HYPE are meaningful. The $100 target depends on overall crypto market appetite, US-compliant tokenization platforms being built domestically could take market share, and Hyperliquid faces regulatory pressure from ICE and CME on US regulators. For long-term conviction he says he would rather hold Solana than HYPE, citing Solana's transition from DeFi into institutional adoption as the stronger structural story over a multi-year horizon.

On crypto AI, van de Poppe argues that protocol valuations are super low relative to traditional AI companies, which he says are priced at a trillion dollars or higher with 50 to 75 percent downside risk from those levels. He singles out NEAR and BitTensor as the two infrastructure-layer AI plays worth holding. NEAR's revenue grew from $10 million to a projected $72 to $100 million within 2025, yet its market cap sits at approximately $1 billion, which he calls super low. He points to NEAR Intents for cross-protocol swaps and AI agent functionality as additional value drivers, and says NEAR reaching $10 to $20 would represent fair value relative to its growth compared to upcoming AI IPOs. BitTensor has dropped 70 to 80 percent in price over the past year even as its ecosystem expanded, and van de Poppe sees $1,000 to $2,000 as fair value given that ecosystem growth. He acknowledges the question of whether BitTensor outperforms Hyperliquid will be close but says both belong in a crypto portfolio. He also notes that the recent decline in AI crypto protocol valuations reflects broader crypto market weakness rather than any deterioration in the underlying protocols themselves.

Van de Poppe views privacy as one of the biggest conversations in both institutional and retail crypto but draws a sharp line between privacy and full anonymity. Zcash has risen 8 to 9x from its lows while many other protocols are up only 30 to 50 percent, yet he says he finds it very difficult to construct an investment thesis for Zcash at current valuations. He cannot include fully private coins in fund strategies due to European regulatory restrictions, and he argues that governments will step in on fully private blockchains as they have over the past eight years. His preferred outcome is a private blockchain that allows selective government access for tax or wallet checks, pointing to Chainlink's implementation of selective privacy through JP Morgan and the Kinexus platform as the model likely to prevail.

On macro, van de Poppe is watching Japanese yields and Fed policy as the two dominant variables for the next four to six weeks. He does not expect the Fed to cut rates and considers rate hikes more likely given current inflation, which he says would be negative for crypto and risk assets broadly. A decline in yields would be the trigger for a risk-on environment where indices and crypto perform well. The macro backdrop therefore introduces meaningful uncertainty around all of his near-term price targets, including the $100 call on HYPE, since that target is explicitly conditioned on broader market appetite holding up through the period.