Hyperliquid Reignited Interest in Crypto Perps. Can Coinbase and Robinhood Capitalize?

Perpetual futures are a giant in the crypto industry, but for the most part there has been a moat preventing U.S. customers from accessing them. As they finally enter the U.S. market, will they find friendly-footing? The ever growing retail investor base says yes, but it won’t be a cakewalk.

Hyperliquid Reignited Interest in Crypto Perps. Can Coinbase and Robinhood Capitalize?

Hyperliquid, driven by rising demand for its perpetual futures, is increasingly taking share from behemoths like Binance. But perps have been an afterthought in America. That is about to change.

Not much has been able to shake Binance from its eight-year perch as the world’s largest crypto exchange, including the resignation of its billionaire founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) and payment of a record $4.3 billion fine for violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws back in 2023.

But an upstart decentralized exchange called Hyperliquid, which has no official headquarters and does not run users through any sort of anti-money laundering program, is making Binance sweat. 

Hyperliquid specializes in a bespoke product called perpetual futures, aka perps, which is a crypto-specific derivatives contract that allows users to bet on the price of an asset, with leverage, without many of the operational headaches that come with traditional futures. 

Its perps volume has grown from a meager $25.9 billion in June 2024 to $2.63 trillion in May 2025. As of this month (which has incomplete data), Hyperliquid accounts for 11.47% of Binance’s perpetuals market. 

CZ and Hyperliquid Labs founder Jeff Yan have even subtweeted each other with long posts about the merits of one of Hyperliquid’s most unusual features, which is that, like most DeFi protocols, all trades are transparent.

That competition is only a microcosm of a larger incoming shift. Perps, a retail-focused product, have mostly serviced overseas markets, primarily in Asia.

Now, Coinbase and Robinhood are bringing perpetuals onto U.S. shores. Coinbase announced the launch at its annual State of Crypto event this month in New York City. While Robinhood has not confirmed anything publicly, Arthur Hayes, who founded BitMEX and is credited with creating the entire perpetual futures industry, said as much on a recent episode of the Unchained podcast. 

These products have the potential to transform crypto trading in the U.S., and they are arriving at this moment with some significant tailwinds. They might even be able to take away some market share from Hyperliquid, which likely services a large number of American customers despite being banned in the country. And the growth of these products could have a significant impact on the stock prices for each of these companies as they try to find ways to turbocharge trading volumes amid a somewhat stagnant market.

However, success in this market is not as simple as it may seem, and copying Hyperliquid’s playbook is far from straightforward. Here are some factors that will determine the success of perps in the U.S. 

Why Companies Are Racing to Offer Perps

Perps are a very big business. According to data from asset manager Grayscale provided to Unchained, in the first six months the perps market traded $10.17 trillion in volume across centralized and decentralized exchanges. In contrast, the spot market handled $3.06 trillion in volume. That is a 232% difference.

But for an exchange like Coinbase and Robinhood, this is blue ocean territory. Robinhood’s crypto revenue comes exclusively from its spot trading, which tends to focus on memecoins, and is a major portion of the company’s overall revenue. In its Q1 filings, crypto trading brought in $252 million in revenue, good for 43.2% of its $583 million in transaction-based revenue. Coinbase, which is the largest spot exchange in the U.S., brought in over $1.2 billion in transaction revenue last quarter, with the vast majority of it, 86.8%, coming from retail traders. Anything that can be done to cross-sell to this retail base will be bullish for its bottom line.

“If you're really trying to get spot-like exposure with margin, perpetuals are nice because then you can put on the trade once and then leave it for as long as you want without having to worry about rolling,” said Michael Dunn, chief executive officer of Bitnomial, the only regulated issuer of perpetual futures in the U.S., in an interview. (Rolling is a process in the derivatives business where traders purchase new contracts with a future expiry when current ones reach their term dates. It can be a cumbersome process and requires participants to actively track those dates on a regular basis — all of which is a non-issue with perps.)

Americans Are Very Interested in Perps

Hyperliquid may be banned in the U.S., but it’s clear Americans are interested in the platform. According to data from SimilarWeb looking at website traffic over the last 30 days ending June 20, Hyperliquid’s foundation page, which is the first result that comes when you search for the platform online but is separate from its trading platform, received 3.5 million website visitors — and more came from the U.S. than any other country in the world. In fact, 25% of its total traffic came from the U.S. That amounts to approximately 875,000 monthly visitors.

These numbers are particularly notable because the U.S. does not factor in the top 3 home countries of other major derivatives providers, such as Bitget, Deribit, Bybit, and Binance. 

Now, this does not mean that Hyperliquid has 875,000 U.S. customers or that 25% of its customer base comes from America. The exchange’s trading interface has a big red banner saying that it is banned in the U.S. and if a user tries to connect a wallet with an American IP address, they will be blocked. But at least one person from a major trading firm, who spoke to Unchained on the condition of anonymity, said that it is trivial to bypass geoblocking with a virtual private network (VPN) provider.

Regardless of what U.S. traders are doing on Hyperliquid, the web visit activity bodes well for Coinbase’s and Robinhood’s offerings.

U.S. Retail Traders Have Limited Options to Get Leverage on Crypto

Perps aren’t the only way to make leveraged bets — on crypto or otherwise. 

Options

Robinhood was one of the big winners from the pandemic. It surged to record popularity on the back of options trading for meme stocks like GameStop, AMC, and others. Unlike futures, options only give the purchaser the choice to exercise a contractual agreement rather than the obligation. Americans like options because they offer the ability to get leverage, meaning that you can borrow money to make a much larger directional bet on the price of an asset than the amount of money in your account. If investing were a video game, options trading would be the equivalent of playing at an advanced level.

But crypto options are largely non-existent in the U.S. market and the futures that are available are mostly limited to institutions. “Those markets are pretty heavily regulated by regulators that have over many years determined the correct leverage ratio for those assets and who has access to trade a CME future. It requires you to have an account at an FCM and you need to do the full KYC and all that kind of stuff. And then you're limited in the amount of margin and leverage you can use,” said the head of markets at one prominent trading firm who requested anonymity. “And then same thing with stocks for single name equities: there is no futures market. It is regulated by margin rules at brokerages.”

By far the world’s largest crypto options provider is Panama-based Deribit. The company recently announced an agreement to be acquired by Coinbase for $2.9 billion, but for now it is still going to be blocked in the US, and it is largely for institutions. “Options are primarily used by large dealing desks or hedge funds that are seeking the sort of asymmetric profile of options to express a very specific view or to extract yield from the market. And so those are more sophisticated prerogatives that usually are carried by more sophisticated institutional participants,” said the head of markets.

Futures

Aside from options, there’s futures, which has a regulated market in the U.S., largely operated by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world’s largest derivatives marketplace. 

At times in the past, the CME has been the world’s largest crypto derivatives marketplace, but again, it primarily caters to institutions like asset managers and dealers. To access a platform like the CME, a trader must go through a regulated participant known as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM). That can be highly restrictive.  

Crypto Treasury Companies

A third way to get leverage in crypto is through the industry’s latest fad: treasury companies. Over 220 crypto treasury companies worldwide hold more than $60 billion worth of crypto on their balance sheets. As Unchained has reported multiple times in recent weeks, many of these companies are trading at premiums to the actual value of the crypto on their balance sheets. But this arrangement is only occurring because of investor enthusiasm and the companies’ abilities to raise gobs of money at extremely favorable terms, often with a convertibility feature into stock that protects the firms from having to actually pay back the principal borrowed. 

It stands to reason that the vast majority of these firms will be unable to protect their premiums in the long run, especially as the industry becomes more saturated. Plus, the need to justify these lofty premiums could encourage irresponsible risk-taking from these companies that may be hidden from their investors. This might mean too much risk for investors. 

With a couple of small exceptions, the vast majority of the treasury companies focus on major assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. The same is true for most leveraged ETFs that operate by bundling together cash-settled futures contracts from the likes of CME.  

That won’t work for retail traders trying to put down large bets on hidden gems.  

Perps Specialize in Long-Tail Assets

That’s where perpetuals come in, as they specialize in long-tail assets. For starters, a decentralized exchange like Hyperliquid has no restrictions on which assets can be listed — anyone can spin up a market for any token. (For different reasons, this is true for spot DEXes as well, but they are not able to generate leverage.)

Additionally, perps can be a more capital-efficient mechanism for exchanges to offer rather than trying to build a deep and robust spot market for less liquid assets. This factor is particularly important, again for long-tail assets, which could have trouble getting listings on prominent spot markets without deep liquidity or could create a poor experience for traders, who might see outsize slippage or trading costs when they put in an order.

“Open interest in several long-tail tokens (e.g. memecoins) has shifted to Hyperliquid, suggesting traders view it as the venue of record for niche perp liquidity,” says Michael Zhao, research associate at Grayscale. “CEXes may continue to dominate liquidity for large-cap assets such as Bitcoin, but we expect DEXes to excel in the long tail of assets issued natively onchain.”

This feature for perps is particularly important because leverage can amplify returns (or losses), putting an even higher premium on the need for efficient markets. 

With Bitcoin continuing to be stuck near all-time highs, despite the surge in crypto treasury companies, it stands to reason that traders in the U.S. will try to roll some of those gains into other assets. Perpetual futures would offer a useful alternative for these investors to put on directional plays.

What Will Make or Break U.S. Perps Products

But the ultimate question of whether or not perpetual futures in the U.S. will succeed may come down to a couple of key factors, starting with the ultimate strength of Coinbase and Robinhood’s brands. Multiple experts consulted for this article pointed to Hyperliquid’s extremely successful issuance of the HYPE token as a means of attracting and retaining traders and volume. Robinhood and Coinbase have no such tokens and, on top of that, Coinbase has a reputation for being an expensive exchange. 

Will U.S. traders hold out for an incentive deal like Hyperliquid users received? Its token is up 124% in the last three months as trading volumes have surged. 

Second, Coinbase and Robinhood are going to have to keep pushing the envelope when it comes to meeting traders’ needs for leverage and ease of use. One variable will be the amount of margin offered, which can be restricted in the U.S. 

“[There is] an approved CFTC-driven risk model. And so the margin and the leverage that you can convey back to clients through the various FCMs that will send us order flow is limited,” said an executive at a crypto exchange exploring perps in the U.S. “So there's not going to be a U.S.-regulated offering, at least not in the near term, that’s going to be like 50:1 [leverage].” 

Additionally, the growth of perps in the U.S. may come down to how easy it is for clients to be able to use their native crypto for leverage instead of just dollars. In traditional finance it’s common for users to post different types of collateral, but that is just getting off the ground in crypto. It is likely to become table stakes in the coming years.

“In the United States, people can use stocks, ETFs, gold, or treasuries [to post margin]. It doesn't have to be just dollars,” says Dunn. “We want people to be able to use the digital assets that they have, starting with Bitcoin. You want to trade perps, you can put down your Bitcoin to collateralize those trades, so it's less dollar intensive.”

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