Hyperliquid unlocked 1.75 million HYPE tokens for team members as part of its scheduled vesting

Pseudonymous developer and cofounder of Hyperliquid, Iliensinc, shared an X post after a scheduled token distribution to team members triggered concerns about potential selling pressure among HYPE holders, with some community members mistaking the movements for external investors dumping tokens.

The statement posted to X noted that the 1.75 million tokens went exclusively to team members as part of vesting schedules announced a year ago, reminding the community that Hyperliquid did not share any tokens to external investors, as the platform never raised venture capital.

Hyperliquid: There are no investor unlocks

The post included a Discord screenshot stating: “As announced a year ago, Hyperliquid Labs’ tokens unlocked on Nov 29, 2025. Different team members have different vesting schedules and can choose what to do with their vested tokens.

Today, 1.75M tokens were distributed to different team members. We are thankful for each person’s contributions to the team and the broader ecosystem.

For perspective, ~270M tokens were fully unlocked on Nov 29, 2024, in the largest airdrop in history, measured in today’s market value at ~$9.5B.

There are no investor unlocks, as Hyperliquid never raised any external capital.”

Why the clarification was needed

Some analysts flagged the token movement, and it sparked speculation that external investors were preparing to sell.

On-chain monitoring and analytics platform Lookonchain posted during the early hours of November 30 that the Hyperliquid team had been unstaking and restaking. It wrote, “The HyperLiquid team recently unstaked 2.6M $HYPE ($89.2M).

Of that amount: 1,088,822 $HYPE($37.4M) was restaked; 900,869 $HYPE($30.9M) remains in the wallet; 609,108 $HYPE($20.9M) was sent to #Flowdesk;

1,200 $HYPE was sold for 41,193.45 $USDC.”

However, the team only sold a fraction of HYPE, which has tipped the scales back toward optimism, as many observers speculated that the team was still very much bullish with its holding position.

HYPE fell 4.6% following the unlocking news and has fallen by over 6% in the past 24 hours as of the time of writing. The token has declined by over 43% since its September all-time high of $59.40.

The no-VC structure

Hyperliquid distributed 31% of its one billion token supply to users during its November 2024 airdrop, with 23.8% allocated to the team under a one-year lockup. The remaining 38.888% is reserved for future emissions.

The leadership says it hasn’t raised any funds, and the statement from its founders also shows that it’s quite sentimental. Co-founder Jeff Yan said in the past that the idea of raising funds from VCs seemed fake to him.

Although the platform announced last month that it had filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion for HYPE token purchases and expansion.

Join a premium crypto trading community free for 30 days - normally $100/mo.