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HyENA Announces Gradual Shutdown of All Perpetual Markets

Based on the Hyperliquid HIP-3 standard, the USDe margin perpetual platform HyENA has announced it will cease operations and close all its markets. The team claims that user funds are not at risk.

HyENA was built by the Based team, with margin and pricing anchored to Ethena's USDe. The product logic is to allow idle margin on perpetual positions to continue earning interest and return the profits that would have been retained by stablecoin issuers back to traders. The official operational results state that it has accumulated over $4 billion in transactions, served over 12,000 traders, and issued nearly 2.5 million USDe rewards for USDe margin. At launch, alternative stablecoins on Hyperliquid were still in open competition, with USDT, USDe, and USDH all vying for margin share.

The reason for the shutdown is described as a change in the anchor of the liquidation layer. The team stated that after Hyperliquid and USDC formed further strategic synergy, the expansion space for USDe margin on this execution layer was compressed, making it no longer cost-effective to maintain an independent deployer, thus opting to exit rather than switch to other collateral. The official sunset guide specifies: traders can close positions themselves from August 28 to 30; from August 31 to September 2, 18 markets will be sequentially delisted, six per day, one per hour, from 10:00 UTC to 15:00 UTC.

The delisting order has been arranged for specific assets. On August 31, the order will be XPL, SUI, BNB, ADA, LINK, FARTCOIN; on September 1, it will be XRP, DOGE, 1000PEPE, LTC, BASED, ZEC; and on September 2, it will conclude with PUMP, ENA, SOL, HYPE, ETH, BTC. After the market enters the delisting pricing phase, the marked price will converge to the one-hour time-weighted average of the oracle price and settle, with positions automatically liquidated at the final marked price, and margin returned to the spot balance, requiring no manual operation from users.

HLPe deposits have stopped being accepted since August 26, but withdrawal channels remain open, with principal and accumulated rewards redeemable at a 1:1 ratio via Upshift, with a redemption period of one day. The final reward distribution date is August 27, and the final alliance rewards will be distributed on September 9. Ethena Exchange Rewards ended in June 2026; HyENA Points are set to a final state, with no snapshots, conversions, or airdrops, and points have no monetary value. The official also stated: HyENA has no tokens and no issuance plans.

Mechanically, this is a forced deleveraging driven by events, not a secondary market scramble. The sellers are the soon-to-be automatically settled long and short positions and HLPe shares, while buyers are absent, leading to liquidity thinning hour by hour during the delisting window. Funds will flow from USDe margin and interest-bearing positions back to Hyperliquid's spot balance, which users can then convert to USDC or withdraw. The beneficiaries are the USDC ecosystem and main site order book that gain pricing power in the liquidation layer, while the pressured parties are the USDe deployers who treat idle margin earnings as customer acquisition subsidies, and traders who still leave positions in the later market.

In supplementary data, in the recent public snapshot of the HIP-3 deployer order book, HyENA had approximately $21.4 million in open positions and about $4.5 million in 24-hour transactions, with a share in the deployer ecosystem far lower than Trade.xyz; the 18 markets will be cleared within three days. The unified margin account's USDe will be directly returned to the spot balance, while non-unified accounts must first transfer the HyENA DEX balance to the spot before converting.

Source: Public Information

ABAB AI Insight

HyENA is not an independent exchange, but rather an experiment in collateral on HIP-3. HIP-3 allows external teams to stake HYPE and build markets on the Hyperliquid liquidation layer, with Based providing the frontend and account stack, and Ethena providing USDe and margin subsidies. This path replicates the practice of Binance and Bybit returning issuance profits to traders, simply moving the counter from a centralized ledger to Hyperliquid. Its historical competitors are not other DEXs, but USDC and the subsequent USDH governance votes on the same liquidation layer: once the community selects a "main collateral," yield-generating stablecoins downgrade from infrastructure to interchangeable plugins.

As a result, the capital path has shifted from "using subsidies to exchange for margin stock" to "moving the basis engine out of this liquidation layer." Ethena has simultaneously expanded its USDe reserve strategy from crypto perpetual basis to stocks and commodities, introducing around $1 billion in FalconX credit to support a new hedge book; the USDe positions on the Hyperliquid side are no longer the main battlefield for growth. Money has not disappeared, but has shifted from issuing 2.5 million USDe rewards to 12,000 traders to competing for new markets where Trade.xyz has already captured over 90% of the equity perpetual open positions. Shutting down HyENA acknowledges that on the same execution layer, once the pricing power of collateral is locked by the main site and USDC, no amount of burned rewards can reclaim market share.

Comparable examples include the exit of "native stablecoin perpetuals" from various public chains after 2022, and the eventual convergence of early multi-collateral experiments by FTX and dYdX to a single settlement currency. HyENA is at the stage where HIP-3 deployers transition from open competition to the main collateral takeover: Trade.xyz is consuming stock perpetual liquidity, while Dreamcash, Ventuals, Felix, and others remain on the sidelines; HyENA chooses to exit rather than downgrade to long-tail coins. The industry's position is not a protocol failure, but an exit of plugin protocols after the host changes its anchor.

The structural change pertains to the transfer of pricing power. The true pricing power of perpetual markets does not reside in the frontend brand, but in which dollar asset is designated for margin on the liquidation layer, who absorbs the liquidation penalties and funding fees. After the collaboration between Hyperliquid and USDC, USDe can no longer differentiate itself by making "idle margin earn interest"; Ethena has moved the same basis machine to stock perpetuals, using a larger pool of hedgable assets to sustain USDe supply. The mechanism is: the day the host selects the settlement currency is the day the subordinate deployer loses subsidy efficiency.

ABAB News · Cognitive Laws

  1. The day the liquidation layer selects the anchor currency, the plugin stablecoin returns to interchangeable parts.

  2. Subsidies can generate transaction volume, but cannot buy settlement rights.

  3. An exit without tokens is closer to the truth than an exit with tokens.