The Breakdown - Hyperliquid Hits ATH, XRP ETF Flows, and a $1B Pitch to Save Ethereum | The Breakdown

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

It's Bitcoin Pizza Day, and David runs through three Friday stories: Hyperliquid breaking all-time high (and why the buyback isn't really the driver), the XRP wallet and ETF flow narrative vs. what the data actually says, and Dankrad Feist's $1B proposal to "save Ethereum." Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (01:35) HYPE All-Time High (06:48) Nexo Ad (07:22) HYPE All-Time High (Cont.) (12:25) XRP ETF Flows (15:20) Nexo Ad (16:25) XRP ETF Flows (Cont.) (23:29) ETH Troubles FOLLOW THE SHOW › David — https://x.com/dcanellis › The Breakdown — https://x.com/TheBreakdownBW SPONSORS › NEXO Nexo is the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your crypto, borrow against it without selling, and trade a range of assets. Now available in the U.S with 30 days of exclusive privileges. Get started at http://nexo.com/breakdown Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to the Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ DISCLAIMER As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice.

It is Friday, May the 22nd, which means it is Bitcoin Pizza Day. Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day to those who celebrate. And it is a long weekend if you're in the US, if you're in parts of Europe. So we have a few quick stories to get you ready for the weekend to get you in the mood. We're looking at hype hitting all-time high. Perhaps we could have known it was going to happen, but it finally did it. We're going to take a look at some of the tokenomics and some of the data behind the price to see what's going on with hyperliquid right now.

We're also looking at ETF flows. Everyone's talking about XRP ETF flows. XRP wallets are booming. We're going to take a look if that's the case and some other ETF stuff. And we're also going to loop back into the Ethereum troubles. We have a proposal from Dank Rad Feist for a $1 billion treasury unit to go and, I guess, do business development. We chatted about that the other day. We're going to jump back into that conversation.

So, enough jibba jabber. This is the breakdown. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Nexo. Step into a new era of digital wealth. Earn interest on your digital assets. Borrow against them without selling and trade all in one platform. Get started at nexo.com slash breakdown.

Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone in the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Okay. First, let's quickly chat about Hyperliquid. Everyone's favorite coin right now. Everyone is super bullish on Hyper Liquid,

and I suppose with good reason. I've got the chart up on my screen. If you just listening to the audio, I apologize. As always, I'm going to try and convey what I'm seeing on screen appropriately, so you can easily follow along. But it's basically the hype chart,

and you can see that we have breached all-time high again. All-time high, this time around, $62.18 is what the read is, $62.18. cents. That beats the all-time high set in September 19 of around $59. So we've broken all-time high. That's a big deal. And yeah, out of curiosity, I thought I'd check like how that is looking comparatively to the rest of the crypto market. So I had jumped on coin market cap because they have a decent, effectively a way back machine

for, for crypto market leaderboards. And yeah, I've got up on my screen also. And this This is from January 4. So at the start of the year, hype was actually in 13th place stuck in between Chainlink and Zcash with a market cap of around $9 billion. And if we jump to today, I'm also going to share that on my screen, Hyper Liquid is now, has flipped Zcash, but it's still in only 10th place. But a market cap of $15 billion. So I would say that it is, it's a big move.

hyperliquid to return to all-time high, but at the same time, other parts of the crypto market have grown as well, particularly Z-cash. I mean, Z-cash is super bullish as well. But slowly, but surely, hyper-liquid is inching up and up on the leaderboard. And it wouldn't surprise me if we would see Hyperliquid flip Dogecoin in the not too distant future. Considering Doge coin's market cap is currently $16.3 billion or so. High-liquid's $15 billion. So we just need one more significant move up and we'll see Hyperliquid jump into the top nine and then even and then from there it would need to actually double in in market cap to overtake Tron. So for now I would say Hyperliquid is going to be relegated to this ninth, 10th, 11 place for at least the moment. But what I wanted to chat

about in particular was the token buyback system for hype. And for one, I mean, if you're not familiar, Hyper Liquid has something called the Assistance Fund, which takes 99% of total trading fees on the platform and uses it to buy back the hype token, which of course creates at least upward pressure on the price of hype. And so this is particularly interesting, and it's why Hyper Liquid stands out amongst all the other, many other protocols who do have token buyback systems in place in that hyperliquid actually really does generate quite a lot of revenue. So that is inspiring a lot of the positive sentiment around hype right now, this combination of real usage, real revenue, a real use case within not just the crypto context, but

the Tradfai context in terms of its weekend price discovery for oil perps and increasingly pre-IPO stocks. That plus a very effective token buyback system. And so I was curious. I mean, we have this, we have the Blockworth Research Platform up here, and they have a handy chart here that shows the net income for token holders, which is effectively the revenue that is earmarked to go towards buying back hype with the assistance fund. But if we just show the quarterly, let's say the monthly token holder net income that would go towards buying back hype, we can see that it hasn't exactly grown month to month.

So, I mean, my brain goes well, if the price of hype is pumping, how much of that is to do with these token buyback systems and how much is it to do with actual investor interest? And what the data says is that actually it is a lot of investor interest because if it was the token buybacks that were pumping the price of hype, one, we would probably see the token holder net income rise over time. And actually, it is staying about the same. And that's probably a function of the overall revenue of the network staying about the same.

At least over the past month, two, month, three months. Going back, there was a spike in February. But even then, we're at about similar revenue levels of what we were seeing even in December. So it's not like there are a ton of buybacks happening. And that's pumping the price of hype. So I found that particularly interesting. but still it is it is nothing to be sneezed at we're looking at the results so far for q2 2026 here on screen with the hyperliquid financials dashboard and it's about a 128.6 million

dollars has been funneled into buying hype directly from the assistance fund so if we compare that to the daily volumes let's have a look step into a new era of digital wealth with nexo the premier digital assets wealth platform earn interest on your digital assets borrow against them without selling, trade a wide range of cryptocurrencies, all in one place. Nexo is now available again in the US with an evolved product suite tailored to today's market. For a limited time, new U.S. clients can unlock 30 days of exclusive wealth club premier benefits, including enhanced interest rates, reduce borrowing costs, and up to 0.5% crypto cashback on trades. Get started today at nexo.com slash breakdown.

As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. Right now, though, at least according to Coin Gecko, a 24-hour trading volume of hype is $1.5 billion, and that's just in one day. So whatever token buybacks are happening directly from Hyper Liquid itself, it is not really moving the needle from my mind in this cursory glance at at at least these numbers. I mean, another thing is that we do have hyper-liquid ETFs, of course. So I have this up on my screen now.

We do see, let's blow this up a little bit. What I find cool is that at least since the start of the month, we have seen steady uptics in accumulation from hype ETFs to the point that on the 19th, which was Wednesday, Tuesday, this is about the all-time high for hype ETF inflows, or not quite. It's about half what the all-time high was back in October when it saw $17.5 million worth of outflows on that particular day. and on the 19th of May we saw about $8.5 million worth of inflows. If we look at the weekly tab, yeah, over the past week, about $12 million worth of inflows. So again, there is some interest in ETFs, and we're going to talk a little bit more about

ETF flows when we talk about Ripple. So, again, I wouldn't call this particularly amazing game-changing upward pressure, but I would say that many investors and many traders are watching these inflows. tick up and say to themselves, well, that might not be moving the needle right now, but if that trend continues, perhaps it would. So I had better get in on the ground floor. I mean, another thing to note is that, of course, now we have the US market enter ETFs, whereas before we only had ETPs listed in Europe, be able to gain exposure to spot hype through the ETF wrapper. And now we do have a proliferation of U.S. spot ETS. And that's the

new investor demand that has been unlocked over the past month or two. And we can see the total AUM by region, North America was zero percent in April, and now it is about 20 percent of all assets under management in hyperliquid spot ETFs is in North America compared to 80 percent in Europe. So I would expect to see this flip over the next six months as more North American investors pile into the ETF hyper wrapper. Another thing to note is that all-time highs for cryptocurrencies in 2026 is quite rare. So hype is sitting in quite an exclusive club right now.

For this kind of read, I like to use Coingo Live. They have a really nice all-time high aggregator for different cryptocurrencies. And we'll see here I'm sorting by all-time highs in the top 500 by date. And we can see that, I mean, hype hitting all-time high. high is quite rare. The only other top 100 coins right now to hit all time high in 2026. Stable hit all time high. Leo, the Bitfinx exchange token, that hit all time high earlier this month at the start of May. We also have meme core. We also have meme core that hit an all time high at the end of April. And I mean, apart from that, we're going back to January now. And the only

any other things are really like gold-backed token. So paid to the price of gold that hit an all-time high in January, of course. But apart from that, we're not really seeing much. I mean, Manero hit an all-time high at the start of January. So for hype to hit all-time high since then is quite a big deal, and it is indeed rare right now in the crypto market. But I will say, I mean, the hype token only launched in 2024, so at the end of 2024 as well. So I suppose this is a little bit of benchmark setting in terms of what the market deems the true value of hyperliquid. So I guess the next question is which coins don't hit all time high next. And I suppose the most consensus trade after hype right now would have to be something like Zcash.

And we are seeing Zcash rally quite a lot in the past month. We've just hit it's doubled in price in the past month, which is of course nothing to be sneezed at. But we are a long way away from a Zcash all-time high, of course, with, I mean, even the 2018 price of 880 still has not been broken. We're about a third away from that still. It wouldn't surprise me if we did break that, considering the momentum and interest around Z-Cash right now. But in terms of breaking its original all-time high of its 2016 price of 3,000, almost

3,200, still at all-ask, I would say, perhaps. save that one for deep in the next ball market, I would say. But in any case, do your own research, not financial advice. All right, on to the next one. Okay, so next we're looking at Ripple. And I know that many in the audience might be wondering why we're paying so much attention to Ripple, but please bear with me. I mean, there's a bunch of headlines right now that are saying that there's an explosion

in network activity on XRP, particularly around the number of created new wallets. and we're apparently linking this together with an explosion in ETF flows into XRP funds while Bitcoin and Ether funds struggle. That's the headlines that I've read this morning. Let's just take a look at exactly if that's true. So I've got this, I've got XRP scan up. We're looking at different metrics. And I'm just going to expand these views.

over the past year or so. Actually, we're going to do it over the past two years. Okay. So, as you can see, the number of payments from one account to another has not exactly grown. I mean, it's come up in the past, over the past month. Right now, we're looking at around a million, 1.2 million, up to 1.6 million payments made on the XRP ledger per day. that is about similar to what was happening on the network around July 2025, with, of course, a little bit of a drop-off throughout October, 2025 into December.

But not exactly a lot of growth happening here in terms of raw transactions. Let's say that. Payments volume is also actually down from January and February, December. It's actually down. We are also looking at the number of active users slowly trending down on the XRP ledger from October 25 until now. We're looking at about 160,000 active users on the network down from close to 200,000 in October. So that is trending downwards. The number of active accounts on the network is also sending down.

This is unique senders. XRP burned as fees, also trending down somewhat. But what people are talking about is the number of new accounts created. And we can see that they're actually referring to this tiny little blip here. When on Wednesday, May the 20th, there were 4,131 new accounts created on the XRP ledger, which is a blip. It is a spike. A few days earlier, we were sitting around 2,000 per day.

Sometimes 2,500. But if we zoom out, we can see that even yesterday's jump of 4,100 is well below some of the other spikes. In November 2025, we were looking up more of that every day. Going back into August, we were looking up more of that, more than that every day, sometimes hitting 5,000, sometimes hitting close to 6,000. Let's take a moment to talk about NXO. Nexto delivers a premier digital assets wealth platform designed to help clients build, manage and preserve their wealth. earn interest on your digital assets, access crypto-back credit without selling your holdings,

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If you're ready to approach digital assets with a more structured wealth strategy, visit nex0.com slash breakdown to get started. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. Okay. There was a small spike in new accounts created and we don't know for what functioned those people made those accounts.

Were they developers testing new apps, all this kind of thing. So not much really to be read in there in terms of like, wow, this is suddenly mass adoption coming for the Ripple network. I would say it is just a regular, regular uptick. So what about the ETF flows? Let's have a look at that. We're pulling up the Blockworks Research Platform again. And I'm going to bring up the ETF flows in a moment.

But I mean, I just want to say like, I mean, ripple is a very dividing, it's a very polarizing project, token, chain, whatever you want to call it within the crypto space. But why Ripple is particularly interesting to so many. people is that for the longest time you probably already know that XRP really really pushed the institutional side of adoption through its own ledger that's what it wanted to do it wanted to partner with banks they wanted to do cross-border settlements with the XRP token it wanted to do everything that the crypto space is currently enamored with bringing institutions on board into the crypto space

when nobody wanted to do that when nobody thought that that was a valid mission because we were meant to be fighting against the traditional finance system and competing with the institutions rather than working with them. Ripple really was really into working directly with the institutions. So it's understandable that people might be looking to ex-RP to finally make good on its ultimate value proposition and pitch of being the banker's coin. So that's why people find it so interesting. And so that's why I'm spending some time on it right now.

And let's have a look at how the ETF flows are stacking up because that's the other thing that people bring up right now is that XRP is seeing interest where other coins are not. So let's see if that's exactly true. So XRP, I've got it up here on the screen and these are daily flows. I'm going to switch to weekly view because it is a little bit better to look at. It might have to be daily flows actually. And so, as we can see, over the past month, throughout this month, basically every single day bar the 1st of May, we have seen positive net flows into XRP spot ETFs, which that's very interesting.

Because at times in March, we had a big string of days where there were outflows. But again, these are very, very small inflows. When we're talking about $3.2 million worth of XRP flowing into spot ETFs, it is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the daily trading volume on exchanges for XRP. So if a small subset of investors are accumulating altogether $3 million worth of XRP at a time, it does not really say much to me personally. But what is interesting is that these inflows are supposedly happening while we are. seen outflows in other asset spot ETFs.

So I'm going to show the ETH. Now I've put ETH flows onto the screen. X up here is in dark blue. ETH is in light blue. And as we can see that ETH has seen outflows pretty much fairly regularly over the past few weeks. I'm just going to show ETH on my screen now. So we've had four, five, six, seven days,

or seven trading days. worth of net outflows from ETH spot ETS. And that is about on par for the course. The last time we saw significant inflows for ETH was at the start of the month when we had three consecutive trading days of net inflows. But all of this is much bigger than any activity that's happening with XRP. If we put in Bitcoin spot ETFs also are seeing outflows. So it is true that XRP is seeing inflows where Bitcoin and Ether are seeing outflows.

But the scale of the uptake in XRP spot products is quite small relative to Bitcoin and Ether. So this is just one of those things where it's like it feels like that positive momentum for XRP ETFs should move the needle when it comes to the problem. price of XRP, but it's not on a scale that would be able to actually do that in practice. So speaking of, let's have a look at the price of XRP. So, I mean, as you can see, I think I think everybody is aware that XRP really pumped at the start of, towards the end of 2024, when, when Trump won and everyone was so bullish on crypto and this idea that Gary Gensler would get the boot from the SEC and we would have a more agreeable regulator come on board, which considering SRP's legal battles, constant legal

strife with the SEC, that was considered very good for the price of Ripple. And of course, we did have a huge bump up. We went from 50 cents or so all the way up to around $3.40 by July 25. So, but since then, we've had a big retracement. We've lost more than half of the value down to around 136 right now. And the price has stayed about the same since February. So we're now looking at a three-month plateau in the price and the inflows into XRP ETF does not seem to have moved the needle in terms of the price because otherwise we would have seen more positive momentum around the price of ripple.

But again, it is early days in terms of the true nature of institutional adoption. when it comes to crypto. And perhaps it could be the case that we do see a resurgent in ripple and other coins that are focused on partnering and working within the TradFi context. And we do see this turnaround. We do see big inflows into XRP ETFs, which would convert into, I wouldn't say direct price action upwards, but it would signal to other participants in the market that, hey, are interested parties in here that are willing to throw a lot of money at the price of XRP

through the ETF wrapper. So personally, I would buy into a lot of the hype right now in terms of popping activity on the XRP ledger. It is about the same as it has been over the past six, eight months to a year, if not slightly less. But there is some investor appetite, at least amongst the ETF crowd to see where the price of XRP can go amid, amid the institutional bull super cycle we are currently in. Okay, enough ripple talk. What's next? Okay, so just quickly,

I just thought I'd loop back into this Ethereum conversation about, about that Ethereum needs saving, that Ethereum needs more biz dev. It needs a more energized application of the realities of the crypto market right now, that the crypto market, at least from the very surface read on Twitter, which again is not the entire crypto space. It is just a very vocal, economically motivated crowd. But that said, we do have Dankrad Feist here,

who was a long-term Ethereum Foundation researcher. And he's one of the two people alongside Justin Drake that had taken advisory roles with Eigenlayer while they were working at the Ethereum Foundation, which set off a whole firestorm of criticism at the. time. He's no longer at the Ethereum Foundation, but he has this tweet that is effectively calling for, I'm not too sure what he's calling for, actually. I'm just going to read it out. The way to save Ethereum, the community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum

and accountable to it. The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it. If we want to get Ethereum back to winning, one, create an organization with credible funding, minimum $1 billion as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with a $250 billion market cap. Two, find a leader who is competent and wants to fight. Three, make it accountable, a board of people who want ETH to go up and a charter that holds the org accountable to it. Four, fund it permanently. A significant amount of stating revenue needs to go to it, a governance mechanism that can adjust it, also part of the accountability, part of this deal.

He says it's very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way, and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus. So, I mean, I do have some thoughts about this. I mean, this just sounds like a digital asset treasury company to me, and we already do have some of those active. One even led by Joseph Lubin, a co-founder of Ethereum, which to me seems like an organization that is economically aligned with Ethereum. and I'm not too sure if it's accountable to it,

but it is at least aligned. I think you can say that. I mean, and another thing, I think it's just more of a conceptualization of what Ethereum is meant to be. And I mean, and I understand it's like people do show a lot of frustration

over Vitalik's and other members of the Ethereum Foundation. Their need for Ethereum to be considered critical infrastructure for humanity, not just now, but in 100 years, 150 years. And that is how they are positioning the network. Do we need the price of ETH to go up for that to be the case? I'm not really sure.

You need the price of ETH to go up if you are exposed to that price action. If you're an ETH holder and you are trying to use it as a store of value, you would probably like that value to go up over time. this is very separate from the utility of the Ethereum network. And so I just, it's just one of those things that does seem incompatible with how much of the narrative that plays out in crypto and that everything comes down to price. And that is the only lens to view anything. If the price is going up, that means that people like the project and are using the project.

That is not always the case. you do not need like the price is independent in most cases of the actual activity happening on the network so at what point are we content when the price goes up I worry that we will never be content but what this does seem to me to be the very start of acceptance if we're looking at the stages of grief over what Ethereum could be and what Ethereum is meant to be when we're looking at, when we're looking at the price of hyperliquid, go to the moon and we're sitting here wondering,

well, why can't ETH do that? Why can't the price of ETH be like hyperliquid and just keep going up? And I would say what we have here from Dank Red Feist is, if we're looking at the seven stages of grief, this would have to be number four, anger and bargaining. We have for years seen initiatives like this come along.

I mean, we have Tom Lee trying to pump the price of Eath by buying a bunch of it for a treasury company. We also have Joe Lubin doing the same thing. So I'm not too sure another billion dollars dedicated to pumping the price of Eath is going to do it. I would say that we need to start moving into the next stage of grief, which is unfortunately depression, reflection and loneliness. and Ethereum is headed towards a lonely existence. It is true. Ethereum is headed into a very ideologically motivated existence within the crypto space. And personally, I think it's fantastic.

I think that for too long, the crypto space has decided that decentralization at all costs is not worth it because the price won't go up. or we need to have every part of the stack be able to regulate it, to be regulated. Because otherwise, we would never get a green light for regulators and we would never see institutions pile in to buy the asset. All these things, I think that, I mean, it's not too dissimilar to what I've said on previous days, that we do need specialization now within the crypto space. And it is okay for Ethereum to take a path that would not convert to massively

sky high prices right now. And a lot of this to me comes from this idea that Ethereum was ultrasound money. And it perhaps inspired too many people to consider ETH as a store of value when the economics of it and the realities of the amount of on-chain activity on Ethereum mainnet did not convert to enough tokens being burned in order to make the ultrasound money narrative become real. And this is essentially blowback from from that narrative turning turning sour. So I would watch over the next few months that we do go into really, really, really bare market vibes around ethers and asset. And I will probably talk about it on future episodes. Why that that outlook on Ethereum doesn't quite match. It doesn't quite match

what is actually happening on the network and what is the utility of Ethereum right now to its users. But after that, we're going to see an upward turn, a reconstruction of the Ethereum narrative. It might take a year, but it's going to happen.

And then at the end of it, we're going to see acceptance and hope and an understanding of why Ethereum is doing, what is doing, and the role it is going to play, not just in the crypto space, but for humanity overall, if the grand value proposition and manifesto as outlined by Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation does become true.

We just got to play the long game here, at least when it comes to Ethereum fans and Ethereum holders, but it must be frustrating for the Ethereum maxis in the crowd to be seeing what is happening to Hyperliquid in particular and stuff like Zcash as well and say, well, what is it about Ethereum that isn't capturing that level of interest? But again, we just have to trust the idea of how cyclical Bitcoin can be. And how crypto Twitter does not reflect the entirety of crypto sentiment when it comes to asset prices. But in any case, this is about it for me today. Thank you for listening to me, rant and rave, as always.

I hope you enjoy the long weekend. please look after yourselves and as always smash like and subscribe it really helps us out a lot all right we'll see you next time