On Wednesday, Hyperliquid launched its native stablecoin, USDH, paired with USDC, achieving nearly $2 million in initial trading.
The introduction of USDH marks Hyperliquid’s first dollar-pegged asset, providing traders with a stable unit of account and collateral throughout the network.
Native Markets will oversee the exchange’s stablecoin and manage billions in potential transactions. The cryptocurrency startup, which includes Hyperliquid investor Max Fiege, former Uniswap Labs president Mary-Catherine Lader, and blockchain researcher Anish Agnihotri, was chosen through a validator vote on September 14.
According to the initial proposal from Native Markets, the stablecoin will be backed by cash and US Treasury equivalents and will utilize Bridge, Stripe’s tokenization platform, to manage its reserves.
USDH is minted on HyperEVM, Hyperliquid’s Ethereum-compatible execution layer, which enables it to circulate within its network while minimizing reliance on external stablecoins like Circle’s USDC and staying yield-efficient within its ecosystem.
Hyperliquid is a decentralized derivatives exchange that rolled out its HYPE token through an airdrop in November 2024. In July, it achieved approximately $330 billion in trading volume with a small team of only 11 members.
Related: Crypto Firm Proposes Cutting HYPE Supply by 45%
The bidding war for Hyperliquid’s stablecoin
The competition for issuing rights to Hyperliquid’s stablecoin began on September 5 when Hyperliquid announced the start of a governance process to assign the USDH ticker.
Following this, Native Markets placed a bid, proposing to issue USDH natively on HyperEVM and to split reserve income between HYPE token buybacks and ecosystem development funding.
In the subsequent hours and days, bids were received from Paxos, Sky, Frax Finance, Agora, Curve, OpenEden, Bitgo, and Ethena—though Ethena later withdrew and backed Native Markets instead.
The bidding process attracted some criticism. Prominent figures, including Dragonfly Ventures’ managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, suggested it seemed biased towards Native Markets, even when more established companies like Paxos, Ethena, and Agora had presented stronger proposals.
On September 9, Qureshi stated on X that he had heard from “multiple bidders that none of the validators are interested in considering anyone besides Native Markets,” suggesting that Native Markets may have had prior knowledge of the USDH Request for Proposal announcement.
He also pointed out that Native Markets is a “brand new startup,” implying it lacks sufficient history to justify winning the bid so quickly.
Despite the critiques, Native Markets prevailed on September 14, capturing Hyperliquid’s first significant governance decision with over two-thirds of the validators’ votes.
In the past week, HYPE, Hyperliquid’s native cryptocurrency, has seen a 7% decline, according to data from CoinGecko.
Hyperliquid is also facing emerging competition from Aster, a decentralized perpetual exchange operating on the BNB Chain.
On Wednesday, DefiLlama data indicated that Aster’s daily perpetual trading volume approached $30 billion, significantly surpassing Hyperliquid’s approximately $10 billion at the time of writing.
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