Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin, USDH, was launched on Wednesday with a USDC trading pair, achieving nearly $2 million in early trading.
With the launch of USDH, Hyperliquid now features its first dollar-pegged asset, providing traders with a stable unit of account and collateral across the network.
Native Markets will handle the exchange’s stablecoin while supervising billions in potential transaction flows. The crypto 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.
As outlined in Native Markets’ initial proposal, the stablecoin is backed by cash and US Treasury equivalents, utilizing Bridge, Stripe’s tokenization platform, to manage reserves.
USDH is minted on HyperEVM, Hyperliquid’s Ethereum-compatible execution layer, enabling circulation across its network while decreasing dependence on external stablecoins like Circle’s USDC (USDC) and retaining yield within its ecosystem.
Hyperliquid is a decentralized derivatives exchange that launched its HYPE token via airdrop in November 2024. By July, it had processed around $330 billion in trading volume with a team of only 11 people.
Related: Crypto Firm Proposes Cutting HYPE Supply by 45%
The bidding war for Hyperliquid’s stablecoin
The bidding war for the issuance rights to Hyperliquid’s stablecoin commenced on September 5 when Hyperliquid announced the opening of a governance process for the USDH ticker.
Shortly thereafter, Native Markets submitted a bid, committing to issue USDH natively on HyperEVM and to equally split reserve income between HYPE token buybacks and ecosystem development funding.
In the ensuing hours and days, submissions were made by Paxos, Sky, Frax Finance, Agora, Curve, OpenEden, Bitgo, and Ethena—though the latter ultimately withdrew its bid in favor of Native Markets.
The proceedings attracted some controversy. Critics, including venture capital firm Dragonfly’s managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, claimed the process seemed biased towards Native Markets, despite larger firms like Paxos, Ethena, and Agora presenting stronger proposals.
On September 9, Qureshi commented 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 had prior knowledge of the USDH Request for Proposal announcement.
He further pointed out that Native Markets is a “brand new startup,” insinuating that it lacked the history to justify winning the bid so quickly.
Despite these criticisms, Native Markets secured victory on September 14, emerging as the preferred choice in Hyperliquid’s first significant governance decision with over two-thirds of the validators’ votes.
In the last week, HYPE, Hyperliquid’s native cryptocurrency, has seen a drop of approximately 7%, according to data from CoinGecko.
Hyperliquid is also encountering new competition from Aster, a decentralized perpetual exchange on the BNB Chain.
On Wednesday, DefiLlama data revealed that Aster’s daily perpetual trading volume was nearing $30 billion, more than double that of Hyperliquid, which reported about $10 billion at the time of writing.
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