Arthur Hayes Sells 96,600 HYPE Ahead of $11.9B Token

September 22, 2025 Hyperliquid (HYPE), one of the most-followed projects in DeFi, is increasingly under fire following the revelation by BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes as to why he has just made a purchase of HYPE tokens. According to an article released by Hayes under the name of The Sword of Damocles of HYPE, 96,600 HYPE tokens were offloaded, which was estimated to be worth about $5.1 million, claiming the impending supply unlock to be the primary issue.

Hayes’ Strategic Exit

The action by Hayes was only a few weeks after he had made a public prediction that HYPE will hit $5,000 per token at the WebX Summit in Tokyo. Although he was very aggressive in his long term vision, he chose to cash in on the upside making a 19 per cent profit in a month. The sale highlights a tactical prudence in the run-up to a serious period in the tokenomics of HYPE, although Hayes is confident in the long term. Hyperliquid will start a 24-month linear release of 237.8 million HYPE at November 29, 2025. This would be equivalent to 11.9 billion in supply into the market at the existing price of 50.

Market Conditions

Although this was a selloff, Hyperliquid is still one of the leading players in DeFi since it has a 24-hour trading volume of 536 million and circulating supply of approximately 270 million HYPE. But the unlock contributes to the problem of dilution, since the fully diluted valuation (FDV) already implies up to 1 billion tokens.

Sonnet, a decentralized autonomous trust (DAT) project associated with Hyperliquid Strategies Inc., has a reserve of 12.6 million HYPE (value of $583M) and 305M cash to offset the unlock pressure. With the support of Paradigm and other institutional actors, Sonnet will stabilize the ecosystem by taking in part of the sell pressure. Nevertheless, the size of the unlock is larger than existing reserves.