Trader CBB's Bot Nets $10M Arbitraging Hyperliquid (HYPE) HIP-3 Stock Perps

Two Brothers, $32B Run on HIP-3

Two self-taught traders netted roughly $10 million in profit across ten months by running an automated arbitrage bot between Hyperliquid (HYPE)'s HIP-3 stock-perpetuals market and Interactive Brokers, according to a detailed postmortem the operator, known as CBB, published on his X account. The brothers had never traded equities before October 2025 — CBB writes that he barely understood what a futures contract was — and learned Interactive Brokers' platform by quizzing the AI assistant Claude, while his brother reverse-engineered the broker's API to build the hedging system from scratch. The logic was a form of cross-venue contract trading: treat IBKR's quotes as fair value, then quote both sides on HIP-3's TradeXYZ equity markets. When prices diverged, the bot bought the cheaper leg on Hyperliquid and shorted the expensive one at the broker, capturing spreads and funding-rate income of the kind familiar from crypto margin trading.

published on his X accounthttps://x.com/Cbb0fe/status/2095250548744405297

The strategy scaled fast. November delivered roughly $850 million in volume and more than $500,000 in profit; January's gold and silver mania pushed monthly volume to $1.7 billion, with funding income alone topping $600,000. The run was not clean. On January 27, a stalled IBKR data feed fooled the bot into accumulating a $120 million net short in gold futures, forcing a frantic manual unwind that cost $1.1 million. The pair responded with data-freshness checks, dynamic liquidity management and faster direct market data licensed through Databento and Nasdaq. From May through July, monthly volume ran between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion and weekly profit steadied at $400,000–$500,000. Over ten months, the bot turned over $32 billion combined across both venues — about 1.5% of TradeXYZ's total volume — at an annualized return on deployed capital of roughly 35%–45%. CBB now believes the edge is closing, as institutions and Ethena move into equity basis trading.

Pons Out-Earns Hyperliquid on Fees

The disclosure lands as Hyperliquid's fee dominance faces a challenge from an unlikely rival. Data from DefiLlama's fee dashboard shows Pons, a memecoin launchpad on Robinhood's new blockchain, collected about $5.95 million in fees over the trailing 24 hours — roughly triple Hyperliquid's ~$2 million — ranking fourth among tracked protocols behind only Tether, Uniswap and Circle, and ahead of Pump at $4.64 million. Robinhood Chain itself took about $4 million the same day. Nearly 25,000 tokens launched through Pons on Sept. 2 as daily trading volume reached $544 million, and on-chain data shows roughly 646,000 tokens created by more than 167,000 addresses since the network launched in July with tokenized stocks as its flagship product. Robinhood Chain's lifetime fees now approach $20 million, with about one-fifth arriving in a single 24-hour window. Hyperliquid — the decentralized exchange whose perpetuals venue has ranked among crypto's top fee generators all year — earned less in that day than an app that mints meme tokens for roughly $1 each. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

A Two-Front Test for the Fee Moat

COINOTAG's read: the two stories trace one arc — Hyperliquid's fee engine is being contested from both directions. HIP-3's stock perps have drawn institutional-grade competition that, by the operator's own account, is compressing spreads toward zero, while consumer launchpads on rival chains now mint fee-generating activity faster than a single perps venue can match. The dashboard we checked confirms Pons out-earned Hyperliquid roughly 3-to-1 over the trailing day, though Hyperliquid's fee base spans an entire derivatives market rather than one app. Large holders are still positioning: an anonymous whale accumulated 430,224 HYPE worth $35.1M, Coinbase launched wrapped cbHYPE on Base, and Multicoin Capital sold 75% of its peak HYPE position — a split signal. HYPE spot rose 6.5% over the past 24 hours. Our How to Trade on Hyperliquid guide covers the venue's mechanics, and the Hyperliquid ecosystem tag tracks the beat.