Hyperliquid-Inspired OUSD Stablecoin Wipes $3.3B Off Circle Market Cap

Hyperliquid News

Hyperliquid’s stablecoin blueprint just cost Circle billions in market value. A new consortium-run token, Open USD (OUSD), debuted this week backed by more than 140 firms — including Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, Ripple and Stripe. Its economics borrow directly from Hyperliquid’s USDH, which pioneered sharing the passive yield on stablecoin reserves across a broad operator group rather than letting the issuer pocket it. Investors read OUSD as a frontal assault on Circle’s USDC and its settlement ambitions, and Circle’s common stock collapsed roughly 17%, erasing about $3.3 billion in market value in under seven hours. Even Circle’s stablecoin-native Arc blockchain could not calm the sell-off.

Separately, the Hyper Foundation — the organization supporting the Hyperliquid appchain — earmarked roughly $10 million in grants for developers affected by the wind-down of USDH, the network’s native dollar stablecoin. Announced on June 29, the program splits into transition grants for teams migrating USDH-denominated markets to USDC and smaller sunset grants for those retiring USDH-dependent features entirely. Eligible recipients include HIP-1 spot deployers, HIP-3 perpetual-market deployers, HyperEVM protocols, the USDH-to-USDC bridge, and Native Markets. Grant sizes for HIP-1 and HIP-3 are benchmarked to auction deployment costs, while HyperEVM awards track affected total value locked. Teams must complete their migration or shutdown by the end of July.

The USDH sunset follows a governance vote that activated AQAv2, or Aligned Quote Asset v2, for USDC on Hyperliquid. The framework is engineered to route most of the cost-adjusted reserve yield earned on stablecoins circulating across the network back to the protocol and its participants, rather than to a single issuer. Under the arrangement, Coinbase serves as USDC treasury deployer while Circle acts as technical deployer, supplying its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol and native cross-chain rails. Reserve-yield sharing is scheduled to begin in August. It is the same revenue-sharing philosophy that made USDH influential — and that OUSD has now scaled to a far larger consortium.

Institutional access to HYPE deepened this week as 21Shares introduced weekly and monthly options on its spot Hyperliquid exchange-traded fund. Listed options give traders a regulated venue to hedge or express directional views on HYPE without holding the token directly, and the shorter weekly tenor suits active desks managing event risk around the USDH transition and reserve-yield rollout. The move extends a growing lineup of regulated HYPE products and signals that market makers see enough two-way liquidity to support a functioning options book. For a token that only recently graduated from perpetual-futures venues, the arrival of listed options marks a notable step toward mainstream derivatives infrastructure.

Grayscale added to the momentum by listing a staking-enabled spot Hyperliquid altcoin ETF on Nasdaq. The staking feature is the notable wrinkle: rather than holding HYPE passively, the fund is structured to capture on-chain staking rewards, potentially passing a portion of network yield to shareholders. That design pushes the product beyond simple price exposure and toward a total-return vehicle, a template issuers have long wanted for proof-of-stake assets. Combined with the newly listed options, the launch cements a fast-expanding wrapper ecosystem around HYPE, giving both retail and institutional allocators multiple regulated on-ramps to a token that did not exist in listed-fund form a year ago.

Longer-term conviction is building too. Multicoin Capital published a research report modeling a HYPE price of roughly $319 by 2028, a multiple of current levels and well above the token’s previous all-time high. The thesis leans on Hyperliquid capturing a durable share of on-chain derivatives volume and monetizing its stablecoin layer through the reserve-yield model now spreading industry-wide. Not every signal is bullish: Singapore’s Monetary Authority added Hyperliquid to an investor-alert list, which the platform stressed is a caution rather than a ban. Taken together, the projections and warnings frame HYPE as a high-conviction, high-scrutiny bet among large token allocators.

As of 12:00 UTC, HYPE trades near $62.92, down about 2.89% on the day, with a market cap around $13.9 billion. COINOTAG’s proprietary 42-indicator composite scoring engine rates first resistance at $64.94 at 65/100, driven by the confluence of the Ichimoku Kijun and pivot R1, with stronger support at $60.74 scoring 78/100 on the Fibonacci 0.382 level and 50-period EMA. Derivatives show a marginally negative funding rate of -0.0010% and about $1.55 billion in open interest, while an RSI of 48.58 and a bearish MACD hint at a stalling uptrend. With the Fear & Greed Index pinned at 11 (Extreme Fear) and Bitcoin dominance near 69.7%, a daily close below $60.74 would invalidate the bullish thesis and risk a slide toward $57.57 — the line separating consolidation from a deeper bear market.