Author: Jae, PANews

As the night sky over Tehran was torn apart by flames, Wall Street traders were still asleep.

On the first weekend of March, most people's phones were bombarded with the same news: the United States launched a surprise attack on the entire territory of Iran, and its Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed.

For traditional financial markets, this is the worst time: Sunday, the market is closed, and trading is impossible.

Even with the market opening delayed until Monday, the impact of the war still triggered significant volatility. CME Group crude oil futures triggered a circuit breaker the moment trading opened, causing delays. Brent and WTI crude oil both surged by more than 10% at one point during the day.

However, there are no holidays in war.

While global capital anxiously waited in the "pricing blind spot" due to trading hours restrictions, the decentralized trading platform Hyperliquid used 24-hour continuous candlestick charts to pre-price the crisis. Its protocol token HYPE also bucked the trend and surged by 25% in this risk event that severely impacted the crypto market.

This is not a coincidence, but a battle over pricing power, specifically "who has the final say."

Traditional markets are unable to cope with "weekend black swan" events, and pricing power is being transferred to on-chain systems.

On the morning of March 1, military operations codenamed "Epic Fury" and "Roaring Lion" ripped apart the peace of the Middle East.

Explosions were heard in Tehran and other strategically important Iranian cities. Local media later confirmed that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had been killed in the airstrikes. The Revolutionary Guard immediately declared a state of war and issued a warning that sent shockwaves through the global energy market: if Iranian oil facilities are damaged, the energy infrastructure of the entire Middle East oil-producing region will be reduced to ruins.

The Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway carrying 20% of the world's oil shipments, has also been paralyzed, with oil tankers in the area slowing to almost zero and shipping traffic nearly coming to a standstill.

However, it was Sunday. The stock exchanges in New York, London, and Hong Kong were closed.

Investors can only watch helplessly as risks continue to accumulate, unable to hedge or exit the market. This means that while the world is digesting the far-reaching impact of the attacks on Iran, the market's price anchor is ineffective.

Investors were unable to hedge their risks in traditional markets as tensions raged over Tehran. This disruption to pricing not only led to a build-up of risk but also caused a massive price gap at Monday's opening, forcing many investors to exit at extreme price levels.

For a long time, the pricing power of global assets has been in the hands of traditional exchanges, but the Iranian crisis exposed the most fatal weakness of this system: it cannot cope with "weekend black swans".

Meanwhile, another system was operating smoothly.

In the first 24 hours of the escalation of the situation in Iran, the perpetual crude oil contracts on the Hyperliquid order book completed several rounds of price discovery, reflecting the market's initial expectations of a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Former Credit Suisse CIO Iggy Ioppe pointed out that on-chain markets handle nearly 100% of the public price discovery over the weekend, and when the futures market reopens, prices usually align with the on-chain market's movements.

While Wall Street is still calculating profits and losses, on-chain traders have already priced in the potential blockade of the Strait of Hormuz with real money.

The price discovery mechanism is undergoing a structural shift: from time-limited traditional markets to 24/7 uninterrupted on-chain protocols.

This is not a theoretical deduction, but the result of capital voting with its feet.

According to CoinGecko, Perp DEX (decentralized perpetual contract exchange) saw its trading volume surge by 346% to $6.7 trillion in 2025. Perp DEX open interest also surged by 229.6%, while CEX (centralized exchange) open interest declined significantly by 20.8% during the same period.

PANews believes that this capital migration is not only driven by the pursuit of asset ownership, but also by a rational choice for pricing efficiency.

Blockworks researcher Shaunda Devens has pointed out that Hyperliquid achieves the best buy-sell quote liquidity in the crypto market. This depth means that when macroeconomic shocks occur, signals on Hyperliquid will be transmitted faster than on CEXs.

According to PANews' observations, although the 24-hour trading volume and contract open interest of gold and silver in the HIP-3 market still lag behind Binance, its trading depth and transaction prices are already comparable to Binance.

It should be noted that although Hyperliquid sent price signals over the weekend, its holdings are still not on the same scale as those of traditional exchanges.

Hyperliquid only assumes the role of a price discovery center when CME is "absent," serving more of a supplementary function. It can be said that Perp DEX's takeover of pricing power is an unexpected start, and it's only just begun.

The logic behind HYPE token's counter-trend rise: "Fortune favors the bold."

While most crypto assets were experiencing wide fluctuations amid war panic, HYPE followed a completely different trajectory, surging over 25% in just three days.

HYPE's intrinsic value is highly tied to its protocol revenue. DeFiLlama data shows that Hyperliquid generated $62 million in revenue in February, averaging over $2.2 million per day.

According to the token economics design, 99% of the protocol's revenue will be used for public buybacks and burns of HYPE on the secondary market. It can be said that the continuous deflationary pressure on the supply side stems from genuine trading demand.

Over the weekend when the Iranian crisis erupted, a massive influx of safe-haven funds poured into Hyperliquid to hedge against risks in crude oil, gold, and various other assets. The agreement's daily revenue surpassed $2.4 million during the most volatile 24 hours.

For HYPE holders, this creates a positive feedback mechanism: the more chaotic the situation, the more frequent the transactions, the greater the protocol's buyback efforts, and the scarcer the tokens become.

PANews believes that this "antifragile" property has transformed HYPE into a war asset similar to a "volatility call option" in a macroeconomic context.

HYPE is no longer just a retail investor's playground; its strong revenue-generating ability during "black swan" market conditions has boosted the confidence of large investors in holding its positions. According to Onchain Lens monitoring, one whale has accumulated more than 540,000 HYPE in the past 18 days, worth as much as $15 million; another whale has also spent 3.69 million USDC to buy more than 110,000 HYPE.

More notably, compared to the serious conflict that broke out between the US and Iran on June 13 last year, the instinctive reaction of investors to deleverage immediately after Israel and Iran exchanged missiles led to a sharp decline in the open interest of most perpetual contract agreements, and the price of HYPE also fell sharply by more than 20%.

Just nine months later, under the same circumstances, Hyperliquid delivered an unexpected result.

Through HIP-3, Hyperliquid has transformed itself into a "decentralized pricing engine for global assets." When commodities are no longer traded solely on the CME, but priced 24/7 on a Perp DEX, HYPE, as the fuel of this engine, has evolved its value logic from a "DeFi protocol" to a "digital macro asset."

PANews believes that the recent rise in HYPE is essentially a process of "macro-ification" of some crypto assets.

However, the high returns brought about by sudden macroeconomic events are also short-lived. If the situation remains deadlocked, long-term market liquidity may dry up, transaction fee income will plummet, and the deflationary narrative will become ineffective.

By getting ahead of the curve in covering "war concept" stocks, what else did Hyperliquid do right?

When faced with geopolitical crises, capital often makes the most rational choices.

Despite the various strategies employed by protocols such as Lighter and Aster in the Perp DEX battle, Hyperliquid has demonstrated greater dominance in the face of systemic risks posed by the situation in Iran.

Artemis data shows that Lighter and Aster have relatively high Vol/OI (volume/open interest) ratios, reaching 3.3 and 2.1 respectively. This means that for every dollar of real money on these two platforms, a higher trading frequency is often required to generate $2-3 in trading volume.

Although Lighter's TGE airdrop has long ended and Aster's transaction mining incentives have faded in stages, their ultra-low or even zero-fee strategies for retail users make these two platforms the preferred tools for intraday short-term retail investors even without incentives.

Because these traders rarely hold positions overnight, open interest (OI) is diluted, while trading volume (Vol) is unusually active, which directly increases the Vol/OI ratio.

While such "short-term" liquidity can create an illusion of prosperity during periods of stability, its lack of real depth can lead to sharp slippage when faced with geopolitical storms.

In contrast, Hyperliquid's Vol/OI ratio has remained stable at around 1.5, indicating a higher proportion of organic trading. Protocol open interest accounts for over 60% of the market share, totaling nearly $9 billion.

The open interest in the HIP-3 market is approximately $1.1 billion, and the 24-hour trading volume has reached $1.49 billion.

In comparison, both Lighter and Aster lag significantly behind Hyperliquid. Lighter has over $45 million in open interest in TradFi assets and approximately $68 million in 24-hour trading volume; Aster has less than $12 million in open interest in commodities assets and $100 million in 24-hour trading volume.

Over the weekend of the Iranian crisis, when traders needed to establish hedging positions, only Hyperliquid's depth could withstand massive selling pressure without causing a catastrophic slippage.

PANews believes that Hyperliquid's broad coverage of asset classes is also one of the reasons for its counter-trend growth. It has been observed that there are seven traditional asset classes related to the current Iran war, with a corresponding number of 15 HIP-3 markets. Both in terms of asset coverage and the number of trading markets, Hyperliquid significantly surpasses Lighter and Aster.

In terms of maximum leverage and settlement currency, although Aster offers the most aggressive leverage, each HIP-3 market provides different levels of leverage limits and a wider variety of settlement currencies. Users can participate in the corresponding HIP-3 market according to their own risk preferences and the settlement currencies they hold, resulting in greater overall freedom of choice.

Even more noteworthy is that users can perform funding rate arbitrage within a single Hyperliquid platform. Taking silver and Palantir stock as examples, funding rates in different HIP-3 markets typically fluctuate, allowing traders to profit from the funding rate difference simply by establishing hedging positions in different markets, without needing to engage in cross-platform arbitrage, resulting in a more user-friendly experience.

However, during CME closures, HIP-3 market quotes are highly dependent on the protocol's own order book. In the event of price manipulation targeting specific assets (such as precious metals or crude oil), Perp DEX lacks a "circuit breaker" mechanism like those found on traditional exchanges to protect investors.

Furthermore, the large-scale offering of tokenized stocks and commodities trading could cross global regulatory red lines.

However, in an increasingly volatile macroeconomic environment, the financial system still needs a financial ledger that does not rely on centralized credit and operates continuously.

For investors, last year's "12-Day War" served as a warning, while the crisis in 2026 is a confirmation. Perp DEX is becoming a macro tool for global risk hedging.

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