Hyperliquid’s 50% Fee Split Won’t Last, Says Synthetix’s Kain Warwick

Hyperliquid lets outsiders spin up their own trading markets and keep half the fees they generate. On the August 12 episode of Unchained’s Uneasy Money, Kain Warwick, the founder of Infinex and Synthetix, argued that the arrangement cannot hold, and that the exchange will be forced to claw back the cut it now shares with those builders.

Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 system lets anyone stake 500,000 HYPE, worth about $28 million at current prices, to deploy a permissionless perpetual-futures market and keep up to half of the trading fees it generates. Those builder-run markets, most of them tokenized real-world assets such as stocks and commodities, have grown from roughly 2% of Hyperliquid’s volume at the start of 2026 to about half today, DefiLlama data shows.

Warwick said he had watched the same fight play out at Synthetix, where market makers pushing to run the order books “always wanted it to be like 80/20,” and never got there. At Synthetix, “the highest it ever got to was like 30%,” he said on the show, adding that outside parties asking for a bigger share always arrive with a sob story about how expensive and difficult the work is. Against that history, Hyperliquid’s terms struck him as an outlier. “The fact that Hyperliquid has landed on 50% of the fees is a bit crazy,” he said on the podcast. “I can’t see how that’s sustainable.”

His reasoning was that Hyperliquid holds the pricing power. Builders can take their markets elsewhere, but “there is no competitor to Hyperliquid” itself, Warwick said on the show — the “mothership,” as he put it — so the exchange can lower the builder cut over time without losing the underlying venue. “I think 50% was an opening offer that probably is gonna change,” he said on the podcast.

The numbers behind the segment show why the split matters to HYPE holders. Hyperliquid routes nearly all of its own share of trading fees, about 99% excluding the builders’ cut, into an Assistance Fund that buys back the token, so a smaller protocol take means a smaller buyback. Gross revenue has fallen for four straight quarters even as trading volumes held up, sliding from roughly $357 million in the third quarter of 2025 to about $202 million in the second quarter of 2026, a 43% drop, DefiLlama data shows. Quarterly buybacks fell over the same span, from nearly $290 million to about $149 million.

Volume is barely down, Warwick noted, so the gap is a matter of who collects the fees rather than fewer fees being paid. The fees are “just going to different people,” he said on the show.

The open interest is heavily concentrated. A single builder, trade.xyz, accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest, and tokenized real-world-asset perpetuals hit a record $3.6 billion in open interest in July, surpassing bitcoin’s open interest on the platform, DefiLlama data shows. Warwick’s concern cut both ways: the platform depends heavily on one counterparty, and that counterparty depends entirely on a protocol it does not control. “You never wanna be fully reliant on one platform,” he said on the show, noting that Hyperliquid could cut a builder’s fees, or absorb its markets, at any time.

HYPE recently traded around $57.66, DefiLlama data shows, below its June record of $76.67, with the protocol still burning tokens from daily fees.

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