The simplest bull case for Hyperliquid is that markets provide signal. If you price Hyperliquid based on the fact that it's at least 417% more valuable than ICE or 46% more than CME based on trading hours alone, you get a range of $685 to $2,070 per HYPE When you consider CME even had to shelve their plans for 24/7 trading, I don't think this is a terrible way to have a sense of the value Hyperliquid creates by offering totally uninterrupted price discovery

Derive ethereum:0xb1d1eae60eea9525032a6dcb4c1ce336a1de71be is trading at ~65x fees post citrini if you annualize this last month. In theory that's expensive but not when you look at growth: * SEP '25, $663M notional, $142k fees, $35M mcap, 35% buyback, ~20x fees * SEP '26, ~$5B notional (up 7.5x), $705k fees (up 5x), $388M mcap, 35% buyback, ~46x fees Looking forward, Derive just launched their V3 in the first week of this month and passed a vote to raise buybacks from 35% to 50%. When you're evaluating the fair value of the protocol, it should be based on what you expect the future earnings potential of the protocol to be All else held equal, if Derive can 5x fees again, then you're really looking at a forward ratio of just 9x. That seems incredibly reasonable to me. But that's not what I'm pricing in. I fully believe right now is the moment for options. The growth could be spectacular: > For some context from 2023 to 2024 perps volume on Hyperliquid increased 10x from $52B to $560B (a 10x, similar to the year Derive just had). Then from 2024 to 2025 perps volume went up another 5x BUT fees went up a blistering 88x from $11M to $971M ! When you're the leading protocol in the category your volume is typically healthier with a lot of revenue producing volume (revenue isn't 1:1 with volume, different types of trades, leverage, liquidations, different markets, etc... impact how this works) I raise the hl example because I want to be full hearted about what **could** happen with Derive. Would I be surprised to see them 10x'ing, 20x'ing, or even more for their fees? No. In that scenario what should Derive trade at? Say you want a 20x multiple on the leading options dex that just did a 10x of fees, Derive would be trading at ~$1.6B (about $1.50 per coin). Scenario's where Derive can more than 10x fees or command an even higher premium on the back of a rising options super cycle get you to prices in the $5-$10 range [within a year!] All of this is just to say that the current price for Derive seems pretty damn fair to me. If the Citrini post teleported the coin to $2, I'd be a seller right now. But we're sitting at a pretty reasonable spot if you're debating at least building a starter position while you watch this thing in the long run. Last thing, yes this is all based on execution. You're absolutely making a bet that onchain options will grow largely this coming year & that Derive will likely not keep it's 90% share but that it will remain the largest player. But the good thing is you can just watch the metrics and be patient. There will be months that perform better than expected. There will be months that perform worse than expected. Such is life. For now I'd say let's all patiently watch Q4 in light of all these cool updates Derive just made and keep evaluating with reasonable eyes. If Derive crushes it, buy and hold. If they flop, sell. Just be patient before making either choice With respect to competition: * Jeff has pretty much confirmed Hyperliquid is not building vanilla options and will be sticking to Binary options for the foreseeable future. That's fine, he's gonna make a gazillion dollars just by winning the perps market, but binary options are inferior to vanilla options so I'm not worried about the competition. And if he does lock in on vanilla options, it's fine. I hold a bunch of Hype and am happy to ride that thing to $1,000 * The Lighter team says they're launching vanilla options in late Q4. First, we'll see if they're on time. Then we'll see if they can compete. I'm not going to sell the leading options protocol with 90% share in the middle of an options supercycle just because of some boogyman * Variational, Hypercall, and any others all seem kinda small and irrelevant at this point. I'll make an opinion on them if they start to matter note: the stats screenshot shows October which is still less than 1/3rd over. There were also some low metrics in the first week of October as traders were waiting for a successful V3 migration (makes sense) before putting size back into options trading and market making. So don't worry too much about the last candle on these charts