GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that's your umbrella for when it's raining FUD outside.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ The token every token will copy.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitcoin’s Setup Just Got Much More Bullish w/ David Duong.
- 🍪 BTC is now "pretty captured" by BlackRock and MicroStrategy.
Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.
THE TOKEN EVERY FUTURE TOKEN WILL BE COPYING 🔥
Crypto's had a flat, frustrating year.
Most L1 and L2 tokens are lower on the year, and the speculation that used to power this market has drained into prediction markets, sports betting, and same-day stock options.
Mike Novogratz (CEO of Galaxy Digital) said as much on Galaxy's Q2 AMA this week.
But he flagged one exception:
"There's been one ecosystem, Hyperliquid, that's had a spectacularly good year outright and certainly relative, just a dominant year."
And the price chart backs him up.
HYPE rose 5.5% to ~$67 on a day Bitcoin managed 2.1%.
That 3.4 point gap means the move came from Hyperliquid itself, not the broader market dragging everything up with it.
Hyperliquid hit two new milestones recently:
1. HYPE real-world-asset open interest (the total value of open positions on tokenized stocks, commodities, and indexes) hit a new all-time high of ~$3.6B
2. Total platform open interest hit a 2026 high of ~$11B
Most of that growth traces back to HIP-3, the proposal that opened permissionless tokenized markets on Hyperliquid…
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THE TOKEN EVERY FUTURE TOKEN WILL BE COPYING (P2)
HIP-3 now runs 24/7 perpetual futures (contracts that let you trade an asset's price with no expiry date) on names like SK Hynix and the S&P 500.
And it's climbed from a couple percent of platform activity earlier this year to about a third.
I.e. Hyperliquid's market just widened from crypto perps into round-the-clock stock and macro trades.
And this is where the design Novogratz was praising kicks in…
Hyperliquid routes ~99% of trading fees into open-market HYPE buybacks, so higher sustained volume mechanically shrinks the supply. The stash it's pulled off the market so far is now worth close to $3B in token value.
More usage = less supply. Automatically.
Or as Novogratz put it, Hyperliquid is a token ecosystem where "as it gets used, money accrues to the token holders."
A simple concept. Weirdly hard to find in practice.
There's a quality signal buried in this move too:
Average leverage on the platform declined even as the price rose.
That points to organic spot demand tied to the fundamentals, rather than a levered squeeze that unwinds the next time funding (the fee traders pay to hold leveraged positions) spikes.
But the core setup stands. While the rest of the market waits for Bitcoin to bail it out, Hyperliquid is generating its own demand and burning its own supply.
That's the blueprint every token launched from here will be copying.
Btw - our PRO team called HYPE (+47%), HOOD (+25.8%), and MU (+105.4%), all before they ran.
Don't miss their next entry. Try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Another crypto IPO! Securitize is now officially a public company under the ticker $SECZ. (great ticker tbh).*
Tom Lee: JPMorgan makes $60B a year - with 300,000 employees. Jane Street made $40B last year with only 3,000. Tether made billions with just 300.
Multicoin's Zcash thesis: Bitcoin is now "pretty captured" by BlackRock and MicroStrategy. Zcash represents the other side of the barbell.
Jordi Visser: The case for silver has actually gotten stronger since it peaked "Orbital data centers need more silver than terrestrial data centers…”
Which crypto exchanges publish proof of reserves? Bitget has been reporting monthly since December 2022.**
*this is sponsored content. **this is partner content.
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