Hyperliquid launches USDH stablecoin issued by Native Markets

Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin, USDH, launched on Wednesday with a USDC trading pair, logging nearly $2 million in early trading.

With USDH now live, Hyperliquid has its first dollar-pegged asset, giving traders a stable unit of account and collateral across the network.

Native Markets will manage the exchange’s stablecoin and oversee billions of dollars in potential flows. The crypto startup, led by Hyperliquid investor Max Fiege, former Uniswap Labs president Mary-Catherine Lader and blockchain researcher Anish Agnihotri, was selected through a validator vote on Sept. 14.

According to Native Markets’ original proposal, the stablecoin is backed by cash and US Treasury equivalents, and will rely on Bridge, Stripe’s tokenization platform, to manage reserves.

USDH is minted on HyperEVM, Hyperliquid’s Ethereum-compatible execution layer, allowing it to circulate across its network while reducing reliance on external stablecoins like Circle’s USDC (USDC) and keeping yield within its ecosystem.

Hyperliquid is a decentralized derivatives exchange that launched its HYPE token via airdrop in November 2024. In July, it processed around $330 billion in trading volume with a team of only 11 people.

Related: Crypto Firm Proposes Cutting HYPE Supply by 45%

The bidding war for Hyperliquid’s stablecoin

The bidding war for issuance rights to Hyperliquid’s stablecoin began on Sept. 5 when Hyperliquid announced it was opening a governance process to award the USDH ticker.

Soon after, Native Markets submitted a bid, committing to issue USDH natively on HyperEVM and to divide reserve income equally between HYPE token buybacks and funding ecosystem development.

In the following hours and days, offers were submitted by Paxos, Sky, Frax Finance, Agora, Curve, OpenEden, Bitgo and Ethena — though the latter ultimately withdrew its bid and endorsed Native Markets.

The process was not without controversy. Some critics, such as the managing partner at venture capital company Dragonfly Haseeb Qureshi, argued that it appeared to be tailored to favor Native Markets, even though larger companies such as Paxos, Ethena and Agora had put forward more robust proposals.

On Sept. 9, Qureshi wrote on X that he heard from “multiple bidders that none of the validators are interested in considering anyone besides Native Markets,” and that the fact that the proposal from the crypto startup came out immediately after the USDH Request for Proposal was announced suggests “they had advanced notice.” 

He also mentioned that Native Markets is a “brand new startup,” implying it has no track record to justify winning the bid so swiftly.

Despite the critics, Native Markets came out on top on Sept. 14, winning Hyperliquid’s first major governance decision with over two-thirds of the validators’ votes.

Over the past seven days, HYPE, Hyperliquid’s native cryptocurrency, has been down around 7%, according to data from CoinGecko. 

Hyperliquid is also seeing new competition from Aster, a decentralized perpetual exchange that runs on the BNB Chain.

On Wednesday, DefiLlama data showed Aster’s daily perpetual trading volume was closing in on $30 billion, more than doubling that of Hyperliquid, which had recorded about $10 billion at the time of writing. 

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