The silver market experienced extreme volatility last week, with prices collapsing roughly 31% from intraday highs amid heavy global trading and reports of a potential Federal Reserve leadership change. This event served as a major stress test for Hyperliquid's HIP-3 silver perpetual contracts against the traditional benchmark, CME's COMEX futures.
Pre-crash analysis showed Hyperliquid offered tighter spreads for small trades, with a median of 2.4 basis points compared to COMEX's 3 basis points, despite having significantly thinner market depth ($230,000 within 5 bps vs. COMEX's $13 million). During the peak of the selloff around 17:00 UTC, spreads widened on both venues, with Hyperliquid's median spread expanding 2.1 times. Execution quality degraded more sharply on the decentralized exchange, with about 1% of trades printing over 50 basis points from the mid-price, and the silver basis briefly dislocated by over 400 basis points versus COMEX.
However, these dislocations were short-lived, mean-reverting within 19 minutes. A key differentiator emerged after COMEX closed for the weekend. Hyperliquid continued trading for 49 hours, processing 175,000 trades worth $257 million in silver notional, with median spreads compressing to 0.93 basis points. When COMEX reopened, prices converged almost instantly, demonstrating the platform's role as a continuous pricing venue.
This volatility fueled a record revenue day for Hyperliquid on February 5th, generating $6.84 million according to DeFiLlama—its highest since October. The surge is attributed to a boom in Real-World Asset (RWA) trading, with commodities like silver and gold now accounting for over 30% of the platform's volume. In January, silver was the third most-traded asset on Hyperliquid after ETH and BTC, with $2.2 billion in volume.
The revenue directly benefits the platform's native token, HYPE. Of the $6.84 million generated on February 5th, $5.25 million was directed to a buyback program, purchasing 160.75k HYPE—the largest daily buyback of 2026. Since the program's inception in late 2024, 40.5 million HYPE have been bought back for eventual burning. Despite this deflationary mechanism and the platform's perpetual market share rising to a record 6.7%, the HYPE token price has cooled off after an 84% rally, trading below its 200-day Simple Moving Average and showing bearish divergence on its Relative Strength Index (RSI).
