Have you ever watched a token hover just below a round number that everyone is talking about and felt that little itch in the back of your brain? That’s me right now with Hyperliquid.
It’s sitting at $39-something, breathing on $40 like it’s daring the market to make a decision. The chart is tight, wallets are integrating left and right, and something feels different this time. Let’s unpack it properly.
Why $40 Actually Matters for Hyperliquid This Week
Round numbers in crypto are psychological magnets. Traders place orders there because, well, humans love tidy numbers. For Hyperliquid, $40 isn’t just tidy—it’s the exact midpoint of the range it has traded in since the September all-time high around $60.
Break above it cleanly and the path to $44–$50 opens up fast. Fail, and we probably revisit the $36 area sooner than most bulls want to admit. Simple as that.
The Wallet Integrations Nobody Saw Coming This Fast
Yesterday—literally yesterday—two of the biggest non-custodial wallets in the game flipped the switch on full Hyperliquid support.
First came Phantom. If you’ve ever touched Solana, you know Phantom. Over fifteen million monthly active users now have HyperEVM assets and HYPE sitting natively in their wallet. Swap from Solana, Ethereum, Base, or Sui straight into Hyperliquid markets without jumping through ten bridges. That’s friction removal on steroids.
Hours later SafePal dropped the same thing, but with a twist: direct leveraged trading inside the app and hardware wallet support. Their user base pushes past twenty-five million globally. Think about that for a second—forty million plus wallets just got a direct on-ramp to Hyperliquid perpetuals in under 24 hours.
I’ve been around long enough to know that real distribution moments often look quiet on the outside. This felt quiet. But it isn’t.
What the On-Chain Numbers Are Whispering
Spot volume dropped almost twenty percent in the last day to roughly $420 million. Derivatives volume fell harder, down twenty-three percent to $1.47 billion. Normally I’d call that distribution, but open interest climbed three point six percent to $1.74 billion.
Translation: fewer traders, but the ones still in the ring are holding bigger positions. That’s conviction, not capitulation. It usually shows up right before volatility picks a direction.
When open interest rises while volume fades, smart money is often positioning for the breakout rather than the breakdown.
Reading the Daily Chart Like a Book
Zoom out to the daily timeframe and the pattern is impossible to ignore.
We put in a clear double bottom in the low $30s a few weeks ago. Since then price has been squeezing—lower highs, higher lows, candles getting smaller. That compression has now pinned us directly under the $40 mid-range line.
RSI is printing a subtle bullish divergence. MACD histogram is ticking up. Momentum oscillator flipped positive two days ago. None of these scream “moon tomorrow,” but together they paint a market that wants to go higher if given the slightest excuse.
- 200-day EMA sitting at $38 acting as dynamic support
- 10-day moving averages already pointing up
- Longer-term averages (50–100 day) still sloping down—bearish structure not broken yet
- Volume profile shows heavy poi just above $40—liquidity magnet
In my experience, when a chart looks this coiled and then gets a legitimate distribution catalyst (hello, wallet integrations), the move that follows tends to be sharper than people expect.
HIP-3 and the Staking Flywheel Nobody Talks About
While everyone fixates on price, the Hyperliquid protocol quietly shipped HIP-3. Lower fees, permissionless market creation, and—most importantly—new markets denominated in USDH instead of just USDC.
Here’s the part that actually moves the needle long term: anyone who wants to launch their own perpetual market now has to lock 500,000 HYPE for governance rights. That’s real staking demand baked into growth.
Every new meme coin perpetual, every exotic pair someone dreams up—it all requires locked HYPE. The more the platform grows, the more tokens get pulled out of circulation. Classic flywheel stuff.
Levels to Watch Right Now
Let’s make this practical.
| Scenario | Trigger Level | Target / Invalidation |
| Bullish Breakout | Daily close above $41 | $44–$50 zone / Invalidation below $37.50 |
| Bearish Rejection | Failure to clear $40.50 | $36 retest, then low $30s / Invalidation above $42 |
| Range Continuation | Chop between $37–$40.50 | Most likely until year-end catalysts |
Right now the probability feels tilted toward the bullish scenario, but crypto loves humility. I’m watching $38 like a hawk—if that goes, the whole setup collapses.
The Bigger Picture for Hyperliquid in 2026
Step back for a minute.
Hyperliquid isn’t just another perpetual DEX fighting for scraps. It built its own L1 (HyperEVM), kept the order book fully on-chain with hyper-optimized performance, and now has direct pipeline to tens of millions of retail wallets. That combination still feels underrated.
The perpetuals market is massive and still growing. Every cycle we hear “this time the volume stays in DeFi.” Maybe this time it actually does when the UX gap disappears overnight.
Personal take? If Hyperliquid clears $50 this cycle—and I think it will—the conversation shifts from “nice DEX” to “core infrastructure.” That’s when valuations get silly.
So here we are. $39.40 on my screen as I finish typing this. Forty million new potential users got handed the keys yesterday. The chart is tighter than it’s been in weeks.
Maybe $40 holds one more time and we grind lower. Or maybe this is the moment the rubber band finally snaps.
Either way, Hyperliquid just put itself in the pole position for the next leg of the perpetuals narrative. And narratives, as we all know, are what drive price in crypto.
I know where I’m leaning. Do you?
