HYPE price could suffer as Binance takes its revenue: Alice Liu

Alice Liu of CoinMarketCap said Bitcoin’s recent rebound—peaking near $81,600 in early September after dipping to roughly $59,000 in June—may have already marked the market’s low for this cycle. She noted that while bitcoin’s price action matters, some of the more notable activity right now is occurring in tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and perpetual futures markets.

Hyperliquid has been a major beneficiary of that activity, and Liu highlighted two distinct dynamics: network activity and token price, which do not always move in lockstep. The Hype token recently reached an all-time high near $86, and Hyperliquid has supported that momentum by using platform revenue to repurchase tokens on the open market—reportedly spending more than $400 million on buybacks. The token has also gained materially, rising about 47.5% over the past month.

But Liu warned the sustainability of Hype’s price depends on ongoing revenue generation to fund those buybacks. She pointed out that while Hyperliquid still leads decentralized exchange (DEX) trading in RWA perpetuals, Binance’s entry into the space has rapidly shifted volume and liquidity toward the centralized exchange. Liu said Binance now accounts for roughly half of the RWA perp market, a move that could pull activity—and the fees that fund buybacks—away from Hyperliquid.

Beyond RWA markets, Liu expressed caution about the AI-crypto narrative, distinguishing between AI infrastructure projects with measurable utility and meme-like AI tokens that lack utility. She suggested speculative, concept-only AI tokens face strong competition from established AI and memory stocks and could decline sharply, whereas infrastructure-focused projects may retain utility but still trade at a discount. Liu also offered a more conservative public price view for Bitcoin, suggesting $500,000 by 2030 as a plausible outcome rather than the more aggressive $1 million forecasts voiced by some industry figures.