I still remember the exact day Hyperliquid blasted past $40 like it was headed to the moon without looking back. Everyone in the perpetuals trading channels was calling for new all-time highs, myself included. Fast forward a couple of weeks and the mood has flipped completely. The chart looks exhausted, the volume tells a painful story, and that $29 zone everyone swore was rock-solid is starting to crack. Honestly, it hurts a little to watch.
If you’ve been trading crypto for more than one cycle, you know this feeling – when the “obvious” support suddenly isn’t so obvious anymore. That’s exactly where Hyperliquid sits right now.
The One Chart That Keeps Me Up at Night
Let me paint the picture clearly. On the daily timeframe, Hyperliquid has printed a textbook series of lower highs and lower lows ever since it rejected hard at the previous range high. That alone confirms the bearish structure is intact. No amount of hopium tweets can change geometry.
What makes this move particularly nasty is how cleanly price lost the point of control – that fat volume node around $34-$35 where most of the trading happened during the uptrend. Once that level flipped from support to resistance, the path of least resistance shifted south, and it hasn’t looked back.
Right now price is grinding along the $29 value area low. Think of it as the floor of the previous range. In volume profile terms, this is where the market previously agreed fair value was. When price trades below the value area low for too long, the next logical stop is usually the value area low of the prior swing – in this case around $19. Brutal, but that’s how markets work.
Volume Doesn’t Lie – And It’s Telling a Scary Story
Perhaps the most worrying part isn’t even the price action itself. It’s the volume.
During every meaningful bounce in the past two months, buying volume looked anemic. Green bars on the histogram barely poked above average. Compare that to the selling waves – those red volume bars tower over everything. That imbalance is classic distribution.
In my experience, when buyers refuse to show up at major structural levels, the breakdown is usually just a matter of time.
We’ve seen this movie before with plenty of hyped DeFi tokens. The crowd gets excited, price rips, exchanges list the perpetual, leverage gets wild, then reality sets in and the smart money quietly exits while retail is still drawing arrows to $100.
The $29 Level – Make or Break Moment
Let’s zoom in on the current battleground.
- Daily and weekly value area low sitting right at $29
- Psychological round number (always matters more than people admit)
- Multiple touch point from the September-October range
- 38.2% Fibonacci retracement of the entire leg up
All those confluences should make $29 an absolute magnet for buyers. Yet every rally from here dies almost instantly. That tells you everything about the current supply-demand dynamic.
I’ve been watching the order book on the Hyperliquid perp pretty obsessively. The bids below $29 are thin. Like, scary thin. A single decent-sized seller could wipe them out and send us cascading lower in minutes. In leveraged perpetual markets, that’s exactly how violent moves start.
What a Breakdown Would Actually Look Like
If we close a daily candle below $29 – and I mean a convincing close, not just a wick – the probability of a swift move to $19 jumps dramatically. Here’s why:
- Stop-loss cluster hunting below the level
- Liquidation cascade on over-leveraged longs
- Break of range low triggers algorithmic selling
- Next major volume node sits near $19
I wouldn’t be shocked to see a 30-35% drop happen in less than 48 hours once the dam breaks. That’s just the nature of low-liquidity altcoin perps when sentiment flips.
Is There Any Bull Case Left?
Of course there is. Markets love to fake people out.
A sudden surge in volume at $29 accompanied by a strong green candle could absolutely trigger a short squeeze back toward $34-$35. The fact that funding rates have been negative for days means a lot of bears are getting comfortable. That’s usually when the market likes to punish complacency.
Fundamentally, Hyperliquid still runs one of the fastest and cheapest perpetuals platforms in crypto. The tech is legitimately impressive. But right now? Fundamentals don’t matter when the chart is bleeding and volume is one-sided.
My Personal Trading Plan for HYPE Right Now
Full transparency – I’m mostly on the sidelines with a small short bias.
I have a limit buy zone sitting between $18.50-$20.50 if we get the breakdown I expect. That’s the prior value area low and also lines up with the 61.8% retracement. If price sweeps there and shows strong reversal volume, I’ll start scaling in for a trade back to $28+.
On the flip side, I have a tight stop on any remaining long exposure above $33. A move back over that level would invalidate the entire bearish thesis and probably send us ripping toward new highs. But honestly? The probability feels low right now.
Sometimes the hardest trade is the one where you do nothing and wait for your level. Patience has saved me more money than any indicator ever has.
The Bigger Picture for Perpetual DEX Tokens
Zooming out, Hyperliquid isn’t alone in this pain. Most of past cycle’s perpetual DEX darlings are down badly from their peaks. The simple truth is that trading volume across crypto has contracted from the manic levels we saw in 2024, and these platforms live or die by fees.
When Bitcoin consolidates and altcoins bleed, retail traders blow up, volume dries, and suddenly those beautiful revenue numbers start shrinking. That’s the reality check a lot of these projects are facing right now.
Does that mean Hyperliquid is dead? Absolutely not. The team is still shipping, the order book depth remains respectable, and the underlying tech advantage hasn’t gone anywhere. But tokens are sentiment instruments first and utility second. Until the broader market turns, expecting these prices to magically recover is wishful thinking.
Final Thoughts – Respect the Chart
I’ve learned the hard way over the years that fighting obvious market structure rarely ends well. Right now, Hyperliquid is showing every sign of a tired market rolling over. The volume profile, the price action, the momentum indicators – everything lines up bearishly.
Could we get a miracle bounce? Sure. Markets love humiliating the majority. But betting on miracles isn’t a strategy.
Until we see actual demand step in with expanding volume and higher timeframe structure flip, the path of least resistance remains down. For me, that means respecting the $29 level as the line in the sand. Above it, I can entertain some hope. Below it, I’m preparing for $19 and potentially lower.
Stay safe out there. The market always teaches the same lessons – just with different tokens each cycle.
Whatever you decide to do with Hyperliquid, make sure it’s based on what the chart is actually showing, not what you hope it will do. That distinction has saved my account more times than I can count.
