• HyperEVM is one of the few L1s that has seen traction. Hyperliquid’s success + the fact that Hyperliquid team still has a decent amount of HYPE tokens leftover for community implies that they might do a secondary HYPE airdrop - which should keep the HYPE flywheel going for a while

• Its hard to find many investable tokens within Hyperliquid’s ecosystem

• Given scarcity + potential expected flows - best to bet on plays that capture both ‘speculation’ and ‘flows’

• This is where LiquidLaunch comes in

Overview

• Couple of things are still working in the market

  • Bitcoin

  • Hyperliquid

  • And select memes

• For Bitcoin

  • Its a pretty easy investment case

• For Hyperliquid

  • They have fundamentals on their side:

    • Derivatives volumes

      

    • DEX volumes on hyperevm with an increasing volume share (relative to global volumes)

      

    • And interestingly - meme performance relative to other ecosystems over the past month or so

• For the derivatives side, HYPE itself is the best exposure

• Beyond HYPE, there isn’t much tokenized within the HyperEVM landscape
  

  

• Heck, Hype has been the best exposure in general v/s ecosystem plays, as shown in the chart below

• So essentially

  • Need to either bet on HYPE alone (safe option) or something that captures HYPE and its memes + fundamental growth

• This is where liquid launch comes in

• LiquidLaunch is Hyperliquid’s first native ERC20 token fair launch platform + a multi market DEX aggregator (LiquidSwap) on HyperEVM

• How does the launchpad work?

  • Typical on-chain bonding curve sale - with listing on HyperSwap/KittenSwap (spot DEXs on Hyperevm) once bonding is complete

  • Has a 1 hour dev lock to try and reduce rugs

  • Charges a 1% fee per trade

• How does the aggregator work?

  • Aggregator is called ‘LiquidSwap’

  • Combines liquidity from HyperEVM DEXs (Kittenswap, HyperSwap and Laminar)

  • Pretty typical DEX. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  • Charges a 0.05% fee per trade

• Key innovation/selling point

  • Is essentially that its more of a platform that integrates token launchpad/aggregator under one protocol

  • Have recently enabled LIQD (Liquid Launch’s toke) staking - with 100% of the protocol’s revenue (in HYPE) being shared with the stakers

The core competition would be:

• Hypurrfun (on launchpad side)

  • Has broadly seen traction decline (shown below) - especially post the move to have a minimum threshold of HFUN required to launch a token

• No real competition on the aggregator side at the moment

  

Traction

HyperEVM

• There is clearly a sense of traction as evident by Daily unique users > 50k and daily transactions > 404k

LiquidLaunch

• There is no timeseries data on the launchpad side of things that’s publicly available

• Total volume since launch has just crossed >$50m

  • This gives us roughly $300k in volumes per day

• Liquidswap (the dex aggregator)- has seen some traction

  • $6m volumes per day

  • 1k in daily users

• Lastly, the protocol recently enabled LIQD staking:

  • ~304m LIQD have been staked

  • i.e. 27% of total supply is staked

    • This figure is likely to go up given the team have said they will likely stake their tokens (and not sell once fully unlocked (in July 2025))

  • Rewards are in HYPE, which currently equates to $17m (ann.)

Token

• Total supply: 1.19b LIQD

• Circ supply: 1.11b LIQD

• Breakdown:

  • Team: 8.91% - locked for 6 months

    • Vesting from July 2025 with 20m LIQD per month

    • At current price ($0.03), this accounts for 23% of daily volume and ~3% of circ supply being sold per month.

    • Have to take the team on their word and assume this won’t be hitting the market anytime soon

  • Treasury: 8.91%

  • Community: 8.91%

Team

• Partially doxxed:

  • https://x.com/lordshisho - core dev. Involved with Sei (Seipex.fi - a fair launchpad - although doesn’t seem to have much traction)

  • https://x.com/JoshDev0 - frontend dev

Valuation

• The protocol currently trades at a $58m FDV with a FDV/Revenue (ann.) i.e. ratio of 25

• For comparison, Jupiter and Raydium (not exact comparisons but still) currently trade at 39 and 8 P/R respectively but have had historical peaks >100 during frenzy periods i.e. before both protocols became more mature.

• So, as far as the current P/R goes - think 25 is roughly fair with the expectation that this can expand to close to a 100 in a bullish scenario.

  

• Table below summarizes my valuation and expected multiple for LIQD (4.2x)

  • The core assumptions are around volumes and P/R expansion

    • P/R expansion: covered above - the idea is these speculative plays do experience some pickup in P/R during frenzy periods

    • Volumes:

      • 1.5x increase in base case

      • 3x increase in bull case: seems reasonable given competitor hypurrfun actually did a 10x increase in volumes during peak periods

• The overall weighted implied FDV is $249m, which is actually lower than Hypurrfun’s peak FDV (~$300m) - makes this reasonable. Some discount is fair given we don’t have as much visibility into Liquidlaunch’s launchpad numbers yet

• Given the P/R is a sensitive unit, charts below help visualize how the multiple would look like under base and bull case with different P/R assumptions

• Looking at the potential downside:

  • Return/Risk ratio of:

• 329/40 = ~8x - that’s chunky enough in my opinion to take the risk

  

• LIQD/HYPE ratio - is definitely looking interesting

  • LIQD outperforming hype since like middle of April. Currently approaching prior peaks in the ratio - key is to see this breaks out

• LIQD/HFUN ratio definitely makes it clear which launchpad platform is currently the preferred choice on Hyperliquid

  

Conclusion

• Overall - think the core premises + early traction (whatever data is available) + lack of Hyperevm plays makes this a decent bet on the Hyperliquid ecosystem

• Core concern here is:

  • Team unlocks - this is definitely a bet on the team and assuming that Hyperevm takes off meaningfully to sustain any sort of team unlock sell pressure

    • Its not extreme - so that’s good

  • Outside of the above - the other core concern is - probable pickup in competition

    • This is inevitable - but these guys have a first mover advantage

• Thesis Invalidation

  • Proper competitors show up on aggregator side

    • Likely to happen so key to monitor aggregator volumes + market share on Hyperevm

  • Hyperevm itself loses steam

    • Hyperevm/Solana tvl and HYPE/SOL price ratio might be a good reference ratio here - currently does not indicate any signs of slowdown

Most of the above data is available at the following dashboards (+ helps in monitoring the position):

• Hyperliquid Dashboard

• Hyperliquid TradingView Dashboard