HYPE Hits Record $76.50 After SPCX’s $1.1B After-Hours Volume

HYPE token reached an all-time high of $76.50 after Hyperliquid’s SPCX perpetual contract for tokenized SpaceX recorded roughly $1.1 billion in after-hours volume on the exchange’s 24/7 platform.

The SPCX perpetual climbed about 23% during after-hours trading, trading around $209 and peaking near $230. Heavy SPCX activity made the contract the third-largest market on Hyperliquid by volume, behind Bitcoin and Ether and ahead of Solana and HYPE’s own order book.

HYPE rose about 12% on the session to reach the record price. Trading activity came from both on-chain and off-chain channels. HYPE-linked exchange-traded funds posted roughly $17 million in trading on the day, the funds’ second-largest single-day total.

Ventuals, a team that built several real-world-asset perpetuals on Hyperliquid, announced it is winding down its markets and consolidating into another project. As a result, the platform’s Anthropic and OpenAI perpetual contracts were halted and settled. The Ventuals team said those contracts may be relaunched by the acquiring group or by other market makers in the future.

Market data for May showed combined centralized exchange volume fell 3.45% to $4.41 trillion, while spot volumes declined to $963 billion. At the same time, real-world-asset perpetual volumes increased 10.4% to a record $211 billion. Decentralized exchange futures volumes rose after several months of decline.

Other market moves included broader gains among major crypto assets, with Bitcoin around $66,400 and Ether near $1,796 at the time of the session. Separately, an institutional buyer named Strategy purchased about 1,587 BTC for roughly $100 million and increased its USD reserve to $1.1 billion by selling company stock through an at-the-market program.

Perpetual contracts allow traders to hold leveraged positions without a set expiry and can serve as venues for price discovery when traditional markets are closed. Hyperliquid’s continuous trading model enabled SPCX to trade while many public exchanges were offline, making the platform a venue where a tokenized pre-IPO contract and a native token both attracted liquidity and trading interest.