Hyperliquid's native token HYPE touched an all-time high of $83.27 on Sunday before slipping back to around $77.50, according to data from CoinGecko. The token's market capitalization sits near $19.5 billion.

That run-up now coincides with an approaching supply release that the tracking site Tokenomics.com lists as the largest of Hyperliquid's monthly unlocks. On August 29, a scheduled unlock will release 14,175,778 HYPE tokens, worth roughly $1.2 billion at current prices. The release equals 1.4% of the project's total supply and 2.7% of HYPE's market capitalization.

Hyperliquid is a layer-1 blockchain and perpetual futures exchange that has grown into one of the largest decentralized venues for crypto derivatives by trading volume. Every month since its November 2024 launch, the project has freed a slice of its 1 billion-token supply on a fixed calendar. The August 29 event is the fourth in a row to send tokens to three recipient groups: community, foundation, and insiders.

Insiders — the project's early investors — take the largest single share of this release at 46.6%, against 46.3% for the community (grants, rewards, airdrops, and similar allocations) and 7% for the Hyper Foundation. In dollar terms, the August 29 event puts roughly $560 million of insider-facing supply into circulation.

Token unlocks do not automatically push prices lower. They raise the number of tokens that can be sold, and the new supply can pressure the market if recipients cash out. It is a dynamic common across crypto markets, where team and investor allocations typically vest on multi-year schedules and large scheduled releases at major projects routinely draw trader attention. Hyperliquid's own price-impact history is mixed: after the three prior monthly unlocks, HYPE fell 7% (July), rose 1% (June), and dropped 14.1% (May) in the days that followed.

Unlocks routed to investors and early contributors are the ones traders watch most closely — those holders paid little for their tokens and have more reason to take profits than a community pool does.

Hyperliquid has drawn attention beyond its token chart. This month, Coinbase added 50x perpetual futures to its Base app through Hyperliquid's infrastructure, putting the venue's markets on Base — Coinbase's own Ethereum layer-2 network — and pushing the protocol deeper into mainstream trading rails.

President Donald Trump directly referenced Hyperliquid during a media appearance in the middle of last week, ahead of a closed-door meeting with cryptocurrency executives. The decentralized exchange for perpetual futures is currently geofenced and unavailable to Americans, but Trump told media the CFTC, the U.S. regulator that oversees futures and derivatives markets, is "working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion."

The push lands as Washington signals a friendlier stance toward crypto as a whole. Trump also called on Congress to pass a "fair version" of the Clarity Act at a White House crypto meeting — the market-structure bill that would divide oversight of digital assets between the SEC and the CFTC.

With HYPE near record levels, the August 29 release arrives on a market already off its peak. The next unlock, of the same size, is scheduled for September 29.