Hyperliquid Hits ATH, XRP ETF Flows, and a $1B Pitch to Save Ethereum | The Breakdown

Hyperliquid's HYPE token set a new all-time high of $62.18, surpassing the previous record of roughly $59 set in September. Since January 4, HYPE has climbed from approximately $9 billion to $15 billion in market cap, moving from 13th to 10th place and sitting just below Dogecoin's $16.3 billion, a gap small enough that a flip is considered plausible in the near term.

Hyperliquid's assistance fund directs 99 percent of total trading fees toward HYPE buybacks, with approximately $128.6 million deployed in Q2 2025 so far. Buyback revenue has remained roughly flat month over month with only a February spike, and the mechanism is small relative to HYPE's $1.5 billion daily trading volume, suggesting price appreciation is being driven more by investor demand than by buybacks. North American investors recently gained spot HYPE exposure through U.S. ETF wrappers after previously being limited to European ETPs, and North America has moved from zero percent of Hyperliquid spot ETF AUM in April to roughly 20 percent. On May 19, HYPE ETF inflows were approximately $8.5 million, about half the all-time high of $17.5 million seen in October. HYPE hitting an all-time high in 2025 places it in a small group alongside Stable, LEO, and MemeCore, though the caveat is that HYPE only launched at the end of 2024, meaning the record reflects initial price discovery rather than a recovery above a prior cycle peak.

XRP spot ETFs recorded positive net inflows on nearly every trading day in May, while ETH spot ETFs saw net outflows for seven consecutive trading days and Bitcoin spot ETFs were also in outflow territory during the same period. Despite the consistency of XRP inflows, daily flows are approximately $3.2 million, described as negligible relative to XRP's exchange trading volume, and the inflows have not moved the price, which has remained roughly flat since February at around $1.36 after peaking near $3.40 following the November 2024 election and retracing more than half that gain.

On-chain XRP data does not support a narrative of surging adoption. Active users on the XRP ledger have trended down from approximately 200,000 in October 2024 to about 160,000, payments volume is below January and February levels, and a spike of 4,131 new accounts on May 20 was well below the 5,000 to 6,000 daily new accounts seen during spikes in August and November 2024. The purpose of those new accounts is unknown and could include developers testing applications rather than organic user growth.

Dankrad Feist, a former long-term Ethereum Foundation researcher, published a proposal calling for a new organization with at least $1 billion in funding, a competent leader, an accountable board, and permanent funding sourced from staking revenue to address Ethereum's competitive decline. Feist argued that $1 billion is a reasonable starting amount for an ecosystem with a $250 billion market cap, and separately noted that the Ethereum Foundation holds less than 0.1 percent of all ETH and receives no flow from staking or fee revenues. The proposal was characterized as resembling an existing digital asset treasury company model and framed as a stage of grief over ETH's price underperformance relative to assets like HYPE.

The deeper argument is that Ethereum's ultrasound money narrative led too many participants to treat ETH as a store of value, but on-chain activity on Ethereum mainnet did not generate enough token burns to sustain that narrative, and current negative sentiment is the resulting blowback. A prediction was made that Ethereum will enter a deep bear market sentiment phase over the coming months, followed by a roughly year-long period of narrative reconstruction, and ultimately acceptance of a more specialized role that does not prioritize near-term price appreciation. A distinction was flagged for future discussion between bearish sentiment on ETH as an asset and what is actually happening on the Ethereum network in terms of utility, suggesting the two are not the same story.