Immy Dorse 
Arthur Hayes, the guy who helped start BitMEX, isn’t exactly known for holding back. But his latest take is, well, pretty out there. He’s talking about Hyperliquid’s HYPE token hitting a staggering $5,000. That’s not a small number by any stretch.
He laid this out on a podcast with Kyle Chasse, and his reasoning is tied to the whole stablecoin scene. Hayes seems to think the total supply of those dollar-pegged tokens is going to absolutely balloon. We’re talking way beyond where it is now, maybe even past $10 trillion. If that happens, he argues, it’s going to open the floodgates for a ton of speculative trading.
Why The Crazy Price Target?
His logic goes like this. When there’s that much cheap, easy capital sloshing around, people start looking for a big score. Regular folks, not just the big funds. They might feel like they can’t get ahead otherwise. So they turn to leverage—borrowing money to amplify their bets.
Hayes put it in pretty blunt terms. He quipped that people might think, “I don’t have enough money to do these things that I want to do.” So they go to a leverage trading venue, hoping to pick the right coin or meme stock to finally get that car or pay off student loans. It’s a bit cynical, but you can see the point he’s making.
He believes this kind of “risk-on” environment is inevitable. And when it happens, platforms that cater to this high-octane trading will see massive demand. That’s where he thinks Hyperliquid comes in. More users and more trading volume would directly benefit its HYPE token.
Hyperliquid’s Meteoric Rise
This isn’t the first time Hayes has been bullish on HYPE. He previously mentioned a potential 126x gain over three years. It sounded wild then, but Hyperliquid has only gotten bigger since.
What makes it different? For one, it’s not built on someone else’s chain. It runs on its own custom blockchain, focused entirely on perpetual futures—those contracts without an expiry date that traders love.
And that focus is working. Seriously. The platform now handles over 60% of the entire perpetual futures market. Its trading volume has actually overtaken Robinhood’s and is making a dent in Binance’s dominance. That’s no small feat.
The Stunning Numbers Behind The Hype
The financials are where it gets really interesting. A research firm, ASXN, reported that Hyperliquid pulled in a net income of $1.2 billion in 2024. For context, that just barely edged out NASDAQ’s $1.13 billion. Let that sink in. A relatively new crypto exchange is performing on par with a giant of traditional finance, and it’s doing it with a team hundreds of times smaller.
Perhaps the biggest deal for anyone holding HYPE is the buyback plan. A whopping 98% of the exchange’s revenue is used to buy back HYPE tokens. That constant buying pressure creates a solid foundation for the price. It’s already hit new all-time highs above $57 recently. Whether it ever sniffs $5,000 is a giant question mark, but the mechanics behind the prediction are certainly worth a look.