Unchained - How Hyperliquid Benefits From Its New Deal With Coinbase Over USDC

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Coinbase just became the official USDC treasury deployer on Hyperliquid. Alex Weseley of Artemis explains how this boosts Hyperliquid’s annual revenue by 25%. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsor! ⁠⁠Coinbase One⁠⁠: Get 20% off the first year of your Coinbase One annual plan at ⁠⁠coinbase.com/unchained⁠⁠. ======================================================== The morning this episode was recorded, Coinbase announced it was acquiring the USDH brand and becoming the official USDC treasury deployer on Hyperliquid — a deal with $150 million in annual revenue implications for a platform that previously earned nothing from its $5 billion USDC float. Alex Weseley, institutional data lead at Artemis Analytics, walks through the math on the HYPE price move, explains why the deal had to be bilateral between Circle and Coinbase, lays out his $300 billion Coinbase thesis built on X402 and agentic commerce, and takes on the question Laura's been asking all week: is the Circle–Coinbase relationship heading for divorce? Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained Guests: ⁠Alex Weseley — Institutional Data Lead, Artemis Analytics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things, crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Today's guest is Alex Wesley, Institutional Data Lead at Artemis Analytics. Welcome, Alex. Hi, Laura. Happy to be here. I've been a fan for many years, so excited to be here and band-boying a little bit. Well, thanks for listening. So yesterday, I reached out to Artemis about coming on the show to discuss a number of different market-related things. And in the kind of like pre-show conversation, you said you wanted to discuss Coinbase. And I said I wanted to discuss Hyperliquid. And then this morning, we woke up to this news that Coinbase is acquiring and sunseting the Hyper Liquid Native Stable Coin, USDAH's brand. Or is the start, USCH, the brand. And it's going to become the official treasury

deployer of USDA and Hyperliquid. So this is so interesting because this is less than a year after there was this intense competition between various teams to become Hyperliquit's native stable coin. And Native Markets is the team that was behind USDAH that won that. So what do you make of this new development? Yeah, I mean, lots to unpack here. I remember going back to, I think it was September, October last year where it was a PayPal, Paxos, Athena, Sky, every.

Everybody was throwing in, you know, bids to claim the USDA picker on hyperliquid and become sort of the aligned stable coin. And native markets ultimately won with a little bit of controversy, I recall. And they went live a few months ago and this grew to about 100 million in supply on hyperliquid. and yeah, today's news that they sold the brand assets to Coinbase and now Coinbase will be the Treasury Deployer. It definitely feels like a big shift.

It goes to show the power of distribution for stable coins. If you look at Brickle's agreement with Coinbase, they pay 100% of yield generated by USC that is on platform on Coinbase, two coinbase and 50% of off platform USC yield. So they're really willing to give up a significant portion of their economics just to get distribution.

And, you know, seeing how they've now sort of taken over USCH and USC will now become an aligned quote, asset on hyperliquid like to take a step back of what is an aligned quote asset. They recently came out with V2 of the set of asset essentially means

that 90% of the yield after costs will have to be distributed to hyperliquid to the assistance fund and in that way sort of be aligned with the hyperliquid ecosystem.

So this is like significantly, especially better than the USDA had a 50-50 split with the assistance fund and the ecosystem growth. So, yeah, it's like a lot to go into there. Laura, let's get your quick take and anything you want to have. Yeah, well, so the market reacted quite positively to this. saw a 9% jump in hype, or at least like an hour or two ago when I checked that. And, you know, the reason ostensibly is because the deal gives a really nice boost to hyperliquids revenues.

You know, previously, as you just mentioned, they're, you know, like the interest that was being earned by the USC on hyperliquid was not going to hyperliquid. The, you know, So there's $5 billion worth of USDC and hyperliquid. So that's like a significant amount. And now, you know, as you mentioned, 90% of it will be going to hyperliquid. So, you know, when you kind of look at that, like do you feel like it makes sense that hype jumped so much? And then what do you feel was in it for Coinbase to do this deal? Yeah, so let's start with, I guess, the hyper high price being up 10%.

Maybe let's do some quick napkin math. that's about 5 billion in USC sitting in hyperliquid on the bridge and natively mended. I'll just do this quickly here on my computer, but, you know, 5 billion times about 3.5%

call it in yield. And about 90% of that going to hyperliquid, it's another 150 million in annual revenue, roughly, going to Hyperliquid. So on

today's base of about 600 million in annualized revenue that hyperliquid generates via its exchange, that's a 25% increase in annualized revenue. And it kind of starts to look a little more similar to, you know, Coinbase's model where, you know, today I think about half of Coinbase's revenue comes from transaction revenue and half of it comes from subscription and services. So being hyperlipid diversify the revenue away from purely trading-based revenue, it's interesting and we're seeing these business models sort of align in a way. I think it's a lot more easy to probably underwrite a recurring revenue stream like

stable coin yield versus, you know, cyclical trading revenue. I think from that perspective, it makes sense that pipe would be up eight, nine, 10 percent on these more stable revenues. And, you know, what's in it for for Circle? What's in it for Coinbase? That's a great question. So I think both of the, I think it would underlies everything for, both of these firms is getting USC to be the number one stable coin across finance payments broadly.

And being able to get USC to be, you know, obviously coin based with very favorable terms in this USC agreement with Circle. So getting USC to become sort of the ubiquitous stable coin across. on-chain finance, as well as, you know, like off-chain exchanges like Coinbase. I think it ultimately comes out to like liquidity, be getting liquidity. So, of course, every dollar that Circle pays hyperliquid from this yield comes out of circles pop line and bottom line. And it comes out of Coinbase's too, right?

right? Because Coinbase in the agreement gets 50% of off platform yield. So it's clear that they weighed the options. Coinbase included in this. And I think it have to be sort of a bilateral agreement between Circle and Coinbase to be able to come to the agreement with hyperliquid on this yield sharing. It can't just be unilateral on Circle side. So clearly they both see the benefits in having USC be the native asset, the native stable coin for hyperliquids, you know, perpetual exchange, but also, you know, the outcome markets, prediction markets that are that were just so recently deployed on hyperliquid.

So maybe I'll take a pause there. So in a moment, we'll talk a little bit more about what Coinbase might be getting out of this. and why it's voice for growth, but first we'll take a quick word from the sponsors to make this show possible. Who in the group chat has the absolute worst sports takes? You guys, it's got to be me. I don't even watch sports unless it's a global event, but Coinbase is giving me a chance to out-predict a pro basketball coach for a share of 5 Bitcoin. And honestly, I'm built for this. I have beginners' luck, energy, and absolutely nothing to lose. Coinbase is bringing in pro basketball coach Lethal Shooter to see if you can actually outpredict a pro for a share of 5 Bitcoin.

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Risk of 100% loss. Payouts event-based, not investment advice, not available in Nevada. Coinbase 1 card is offered through Coinbase Inc and cardless ink. Cards issued by First Electronic Bank. Bitcoin back rates are based on cardholder's assets on Coinbase. Back to my conversation with Alex. Coinbase also said that it significantly increased its position of stake type. And that was interesting to me because I view Hyperliquid in some ways as a competitor to Coinbase. So I was wondering what it said to you that Coinbase is, you know, through this gesture, aligning more closely with Hyperliquid.

And if that, you know, kind of move there to increase its position of staked hype, even shed any further light on the stable coin deal. Yeah, Laura, I was thinking the same thing. It feels like in many ways, hyperlucid and coinbase are both going after this sort of everything exchange. You know, spot trading, perpetuals trading, equities, prediction markets. and it's true they'd have to acquire a significant amount of I haven't stake it to be able to offer this

you know a QA and so this shows significant alignment between the two businesses even though there's so much competition to me what this shows is that point base is very certain in its growth as a

as a U.S. based primarily U.S.-based sort of compliant institution, whereas hyperliquid, you know, I think they see as more of this, outside of U.S. jurisdiction, no KYC, platform, which I think Kovace can't really compete as much in, but they can leverage the usage of hyperliquid globally to grow distribution of USC

but I think ultimately in the long term will positively affect their bottom line. Yeah, I think what you said there really calls it because also it's sort of like even a couple of years ago you could not imagine a public company that would have done this level of deal with a no KYC decentralized exchange that does not serve U.S. customers.

But clearly it's almost like Coinbase recognizes, well, okay, that, you know, this world of on-chain finance is growing quickly. The regulations for, you know, how this is going to shake out aren't, they're not codified, at least here in the U.S. But because it's growing so fast, Coinbase has to get some part of the pie in some fashion and the best way that they could probably do it at this point in time is USC. And yeah, it's just interesting because like, yeah, I guess base isn't directly competitive, but you could see in some fashion where they could grow to be competitive, but it's sort of like, for now, let's just

do this deal and get a piece of that pie, which is growing very quickly. We'll circle back to how hyperliquid is going quickly in a moment. But first, let's talk about Coinbase, because you wrote this piece last week called Why Coinbase Wins in an AI Native finance world. And in it, you projected that Coinbase could become a $300 billion company. And that's about 6x from today. And you gave 2031 as the deadline for when that would happen. And you also projected that at that time, Coinbase would earn over $4 billion annually in a gentic revenue. So go ahead and like outline your full thesis and how you are getting to the numbers that you posited there.

Yeah. Yes, we didn't publish this piece. Was it last week projecting your coin, painting coin base sort of in this world where it's a $300 billion company, you know, what would it take to get there? And, you know, we sort of anchored some of our values. some of our numbers in, you know, public projections. You think McKinsey projecting about $5 trillion in agentic commerce by 2030, 2030, 2031.

Scott Bassett, Bain & Co. Projecting about $3 trillion in table coin supply by 2030. So we think Coinbase is primarily valued as an exchange. Of course, they have, you know, some subscription to services lines. Most importantly, there's stable coin revenue line in the agreement with Circle. And I guess the TLDR is, you know, we've seen USC on Coinbase continue to grow even through the spare market. It kind of sits like this regulated spot within the U.S. And so we could continue to see

USC market share of total USC growing as well as, you know, on-platform USC growing for Coinbase, which would all benefit Coinbase's top and bottom lines. But then there's sort of the agenda commerce side. And this is, of course, the most nascent. I think part of this desets,

I think most people you talk to would a lot of people would agree that you know within five, maybe 10 years it'll be more agents

transacting on the internet than there will be humans and there's this sort of believe that stable coins are the superior way for agents do transactions they are programmable

internet native dollars you know, it's just currency, whereas your traditional card, ACH, et cetera, rails are, you know,

maybe not set up structurally to support these like, you know, agent-native payments. So at that point, Coinbase has developed

X402, which is a payments protocol or, you know, they incubated it. They have built the known base that you can pay and they've built plenty of developer tooling around the agentic payments and just general agent building.

And what we're seeing today is X402 dominates in terms of market share of agentic transaction volume on chain. But high 90% high 90s percent that was. The main competitor is MPP, which stripes machine payments protocol. And then we launched in March, a very early nascent sort of space. But even a month to months into MPP's launch, X-402 still dominates basis of the primary settlement chain for agentic payments today. Alt that we've around 90%. And though our belief is that these early leads will compound over time.

basis of the primary settlement layer today or through a lot of USC fits. Exporter 2 is the primary protocol used. You know, these standards will sort of proliferate through the growth of the commerce and we see Coinbase benefiting from this because it has the commerce will be a vector for growth for stable coins. primarily UFDC, which is also like 90, 95, 99% of agentic commerce volume today. It's based being the settlement layer that we think they can monetize sort of across the stack, as well as that, you know, have value added services, tools and things that they can

modify sort of more of the developer layer for Mrs. layer. And I wanted to just ask you a little bit more about. the competition. You mentioned how Stripe slash tempo, you know, they're competing. Google as well has AP2. So Stripe has MPP, as you mentioned. Stripe. Google has AP2. And so it is true, obviously, at this point, that X402 is dominating. And so for that reason, you know, Coinbase definitely has this advantage right now. But because Stripe has just like a very different type of advantage, you know, just with like the merchant network and they already have kind of like inroads there and, you know, presumably agents will also be buying from stores or transacting

in stores or existing merchants. And then Google has an advantage with like the operating system of Android. And so it sort of feels to me like it's so early that just so many things could happen. So why is it that your, you know, kind of like base case is. that the early lead that Coinbase has will compound over time. Yeah, it's a big point. You know, Stripe has massive existing distribution into, you know, potentially some of the exact merchants that would be, you know, leveraging agentic payments protocols and, you know, Android's points are in the hands of millions, billions of people

around the world. Yeah, I guess our, our, Our base case for, you know, Coinbase being Witters here is just coming from the compounding of this existing early lead. Yeah, I think Stripe also has Tempo Circle launched their agent stack. So composition will be increasingly heated.

I think maybe more the bold case for Coinbase is this agent-to-commerce scenario where they're able to monetize the $4 billion of revenue by 2031 versus the base case. I think a few things you have to go right. It's, you know, I think they can't just have an early lead

and hope to win off of that. So, yeah, I'm sure if I answered the question, but... Okay, yeah. No, I mean... Yeah, it's just really hard to know what's going to happen. like even if I look at just where the pure AI side,

then it sort of feels like, yeah, there's just a lot of competition there, literally with things changing almost seemingly week to week. But okay, so I did want to ask about one other piece on Coinbase because here we are at this moment where the odds that the Clarity Act will actually pass are sort of increasing day by day. actually feels like. We have another show where three lawyers gave their, you know, odds on passage. And it was funny because it ranged from 35 percent to 90 percent. So clearly there's

not a lot of agreement on, you know, how significant each of these little milestones are. But, you know, because things are in a positive trajectory at the moment and the Clarity Act is about the, you know, market structure piece of the industry, which, you know, obviously is dominated by Coinbase, at least at this moment, or at least as it's Coinbase's domain. I was curious to hear, you know, your thoughts on how clarity could, if it passes, how it could affect Coinbase's business. Yeah, I'm looking at the policy odds right now. It's clear about they're creeping up. I think right now the Senate is in markup, so maybe people know things that are buying it up a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, the clarity is very comprehensive. I mean, the most important component of the Clarity Act is probably the also Brooks compromise on Sablecoin yield. So, of course, the banking lobby was very hard against stablecoin issuers and also, you know, distributors, like Coinbase and their ability to just offer passive yield on stable coins. So I think it's still to be what the exact final language will be. It's likely that it stays as is today.

Coinbase will be able to provide, you know, interests or interest like payments on USC that are activity-based. So maybe if you're a coin-based one holder, or you transact or trade, you can earn on your sort of idle USC contingent on your activity. You know, it's tricky because I think this interest on passing USC is like a, it's a nice thing to have as a customer. You know, it's from like a customer acquisition perspective.

So, you know, I think that they definitely take a bit of a hit there and their ability. to maybe acquire and retain certain customer set that maybe isn't quite as active, whereas maybe a Robin Hood does offer, you know, Pat Seville on your cash. So I think it'll benefit, you know, they're more active and engaged customers, probably the Coinbaseball subscribers,

the active traders, maybe the base users in some capacity. So I think it's overall an end positive that, you know, there wasn't like a complete ban on stablecoin yield. I think there's probably room for this to maybe be amended in coming years. But yeah, I think primarily what it does is it probably hurts their customer acquisition a little bit. but generally like a positive thing to be able to offer even activity-based rewards you know coming up against it's the banking lobby yeah yeah and and you just mean like from a scenario where yeah um which i guess is now where they are able to just offer yields on an idle balance um

so one other thing that's really interesting that i think a lot of people are noticing on the horizon is that it looks like Coinbase and Circle are becoming more competitive rather than collaborative in a number of areas. And Omar of Dragonfly recently tweeted, how long until the Circle Coinbase marriage gets messy? And he noted that because Circle's now public, it basically needs to pitch investors with a broader growth story. And that, he said, will be that they'll be the infrastructure layer for global payments, which means our. arc and that also they need to own their own customers more. But he pointed out that it puts, that puts circle head to head with Coinbase's base. And his conclusion was that he thought

the relationship will ultimately end in divorce. So I was curious if you agreed with that and generally how you thought the relationship between the two would play out. Yeah, it's a really interesting relationship. Coinbase and sort of incubated USC with the center consensuals many years ago and eventually Circles took full

control over USC but had this sort of business agreement with Coinbase and what we're seeing have in now is circles becoming increasingly competitive with Coinbase you know, Coinbase has the base chain and Circles launching Arc and Circle launched

Circle BTC, which Coinbase has CBVTC, there's Circle's new agent stack. So they're competing on many fronts. And, yeah, I think Omar's point that this marriage might end in a divorce. I think there's like some truth to it. What's interesting about the agreement between Circle and Coinbase is it has to be like a strong sort of bilateral agreement to terminate it or change the terms. It's very favorable to Coinbase. But surely I think these competing business interests could eventually lead to, you know, like an annulma. or non-renewal or change of the terms

to that USC agreement, that really, I think is sort of like where coin mason circle are married at the hip in some sense. So I don't think we'll see this happen for another many years. I believe now in August or September

when the renewal comes up for the USC yield agreement, I strongly believe that they'll renew it. and that'll look under for another three years. But the space is so rapidly evolving that at three years' time, I'm not sure that I'll have the same confidence in the renewal of that contract with the same terms.

So, you know, one other point to make here is, Coinbase, by not owning USC completely, does have some optionality and what stable coins they ultimately support on their platform. And with the passage of genius, so I think we'll see the growth of other regulated, genius compliance stable coins that companies could potentially, you know, support or partner with,

be similarly to how they have done with Circle and USC. All right. So before we go, I just want to circle back to Hyperliquid. And I didn't need to use the word Circle, but I just did. So hyperliquids in a very, very interesting spot right now. I mean, we have just seen, it's like, it's just like this juggernaut that cannot be stopped. So first of all, just on, you know, the perps front, it's beaten back a number of competitors. It has real traction. Arthur Hayes was just in the show. He talked about how, you know, for a lot of these exchanges, he may not be able to know how much of the volume is real. But, you know, when he uses a certain ratio, which is the volume divided by the open. interest, he can kind of get like a number that tells him just how, you know, or it gives him some level of confidence and how real that volume is. And, you know, by that metric, he, he says, yeah, it's, you know, clearly out competing. You know, it's implemented HIP 3, HIP 4. Both of these have been successful. We've seen with the war that real world assets are now just, you know, a huge

part of or have been a huge part of the training volume. And yet it's in this interesting space that we talked about with the no KYC, you know, cannot serve you as customers, all these things. So, you know, I'm just so curious to hear like what you're looking at when you look at its trajectory forward. You know, what kind of either milestones are you looking for or what questions do you still see hanging over it? And yeah, just generally where do you think it's headed? Yeah. I mean, I think in mid to late last year we had this sort of exploiting. of I guess like the purp wars if you will and you know I think a lot of people

probably questioning hyperliquist's ability to maintain its its market share and its growth you know later EJX astor a plethora of you know exchange-backed perpdexes that came into the market and I think we did see I've gotliquids market shares you sort of compress and there's some questions as to the validity of some of the volumes of some of these other perfect exchanges but here we are in mid-May and hyperliquid commands like a very comfortable like 50% share of the purpose market and even through this crypto downturn hyperliquid has actually been able to see some growth from these hip three markets trade XYZ RWA perps equity perps that are doing billions in volume per day

so it's really been fascinating to see these 24-7 markets or people have been trading oil on weekends where no other exchange really offers that. So, yeah, I mean, I really do see how I believe it is, like, having proven itself through a period of, where there's a barrage, you know, an attack on its, on its market share, and it was able to hold up really strongly. In fact, I think it's got, like, one of the strongest communities and developer ecosystems in the space. really almost nothing quite like it as far as what I see

I think some of the questions do come around to you know how we'll hit four play out prediction markets are another one of these ultra hyper competitive spaces Robin has launching their own full stack prediction market with West Goana

Coinbase bought a fish market's clearinghouse as well so everyone is trying to to go for this, you know, everything exchange. But none of the, you know, all of these are Robert Hood, Coinbase, very regulated onshore businesses. I think Hyperliqu's niche in this sort of offshore market, they've really dominated.

I really don't see anyone coming close to you know, taking any of their share away anytime soon. But yeah, I think it'll just continue to be an exciting year, just watching how these things play out. All right. Well, it has been such a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Thank you, Laura. It's a pleasure. Bye-bye. And thanks to everyone for joining this live stream. We'll catch you next week. Nothing you hear on Unchained is Investment Advice. This show is, is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

and my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit UnchainedCrypto.com.