Bitwise to Launch Hyperliquid ETF on NYSE With Staking Rewards
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HYPE has rallied roughly 20% over the past two days, surpassing the $46 mark since October last year. Bullish momentum has picked up on the back of the news that Bitwise’s spot Hyperliquid ETF starts trading on NYSE today under the ticker BHYP. This is the first US crypto ETF where the issuer is running its own staking infrastructure rather than outsourcing it. The sponsor fee is set at 0.34%, waived entirely for the first 30 days on the fund’s first $500 million in assets. Two days ago on May 13, 21Shares launched its own HYPE ETF, which routes its staking through third-party providers. That one design choice has brought up the first real margin contest in the institutional Hyperliquid product race.
News that Coinbase is becoming the official USDC treasury deployer on Hyperliquid has added fuel to the rally. HYPE is currently trading at a market cap of $11.8 billion and ranks as the tenth-largest crypto asset.
The In-House Staking Play No One Else Has
Bitwise will stake the fund’s HYPE holdings through their own staking arm called Bitwise Onchain Solutions. This is a unique position since other US Hyperliquid ETF filings, including the 21Shares product that went live on Tuesday, relies on outside operators to handle the staking. Third-party staking operators take a cut of the rewards, and on a network where the base HYPE staking yield hovers around 2.2%, that haircut compounds across the lifetime of an ETF position. Bitwise keeping it in-house is how it can afford to undercut on fees while still earning a margin on the staked portion.
Grayscale is next in line to launch its Hyperliquid ETF but a launch date is yet to be confirmed. This in-house staking play has effectively reshaped how institutions can approach future flings. The fact now is that institutions sit with two choices: build out a staking stack from scratch, which takes the kind of validator relationships Bitwise has been developing for over a year, or accept thinner margins and try to compete on distribution alone.
Early Flows Show the Demand Is Real
Inflow and volume data from 21Shares’ THYP ETF highlights just how much demand is on the table at the moment. The ETF recorded $1.8 million in trading volume on its first trading day, then crossed $8.31 million in traded value by Thursday. Data from SoSoValue shows that, in the first few days of trading, cumulative total net inflow stands at $2.52 million.
Hyperliquid’s own metrics help explain the rush. As mentioned in Bitwise’s press release, The platform processed $2.9 trillion in trading volume in 2025, over 400% higher than the prior year. It holds roughly 60% of global onchain derivatives open interest and handles around 200,000 orders per second.
Validators and Brokerages, Same Week
The wider context is what makes today’s launch notable. Hyperliquid pushed HIP-3 live in October last year, opening permissionless perp market deployment to anyone willing to stake 500,000 HYPE (roughly $22 million at current prices) and accept slashing risk. That move institutionalised the trading layer, letting external builders like trade.xyz launch tokenized perps for Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and a synthetic Nasdaq index.
BHYP institutionalises the validator layer in parallel. A regulated US asset manager is now actively staking HYPE to secure the network and pass the yield back to ETF holders. The same protocol that got builder-deployed equity perps seven months ago is now getting a Wall Street issuer running validator infrastructure on it.
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