A spot ETF for a decentralized exchange token just pulled in $37.2 million in assets under management during its first week of trading. That’s not Bitcoin. That’s not Ethereum. That’s Hyperliquid, the perpetual futures DEX that most people outside of crypto have never heard of.
21Shares launched the Hyperliquid ETF, trading under the ticker THYP, on Nasdaq on May 12. The fund directly holds HYPE, the native token of the Hyperliquid platform, and it attracted $24.4 million in cumulative net inflows in just five trading days. For context, plenty of crypto ETFs have launched to crickets. This one did not.
What THYP actually is
THYP is structured as a US grantor trust, which means the fund physically holds HYPE tokens rather than using derivatives or synthetic exposure to track the price. Think of it like the early gold ETFs that held actual gold bars in a vault, except the vault is a blockchain and the bars are tokens powering a decentralized derivatives exchange.
The management fee sits at 0.30%, or 30 basis points. That’s competitive with most crypto ETFs on the market and well below the fees charged by some first-generation Bitcoin funds. The structure also incorporates staking, meaning the fund can earn yield on the HYPE tokens it holds, a feature that adds a layer of passive return on top of any price appreciation.
