"Everybody that is in finance right now is well aware and attuned to what's happening on Hyperliquid," Bruno Caratori said on the On The Margin podcast. "Hyperliquid is one that at this moment, first semester of 2026, has been very much in vogue."
That is a striking thing to hear from Caratori. He co-founded and now runs Hashdex, a crypto exchange-traded fund issuer that has spent eight years convincing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its global counterparts to let ordinary investors buy crypto through a brokerage account. Hyperliquid is the opposite of that world, a permissionless onchain exchange where anyone can trade with leverage and no gatekeeper signs off. Its HYPE token has traded near $70 this month, close to a mid-June record.
What pulled Caratori in is not crypto trading. It is everything else Hyperliquid has started listing. "You can go on Hyperliquid and trade a perpetual swap of oil, of the S&P 500, of gold," he said, "so traditional assets, and that has been gaining a lot of activity not just from the general retail public that has historically adopted crypto networks in earnest, but more and more traditional players both in finance and out of finance." The draw is access to markets that never close. "Everybody that manages money has had their eyes on Hyperliquid, especially this year when geopolitical turmoil brought a lot of volatility to markets and things that were happening on weekends started to matter to people," Caratori said. Ostium, a rival onchain perpetuals exchange, has been making the same bet for longer. "Very contrarian thesis at the time when we first started the company that perpetuals were going to be the largest category in blockchain, and that TradFi or traditional asset perpetuals would be the biggest blockbuster product to come out of crypto after stablecoins," co-founder Kaledora Kiernan-Linn said on the On The Margin podcast. Her read on what drives the order book is blunt: "You can typically guess what the most traded assets are on Ostium by looking at what's trending on Twitter," Kiernan-Linn said. The infrastructure to put leverage in front of huge audiences is already arriving through mainstream apps. Telegram, with close to a billion users, tapped the onchain exchange Lighter earlier this year to offer leveraged trading inside chat.
'The U.S. had the most to lose' For years, Caratori argues, Washington used that veto. Even under the first Trump administration, he said, "the attitude was very against crypto," and the resistance ran deeper than party. "There was something stronger in the U.S., an ideology that I think transcended the political parties. People feared this technology evolving." His explanation is the one Hashdex rarely says out loud. "The U.S. perhaps had the most to lose in terms of losing control of some things," he said. "The U.S. has direct or indirect influence in how dollars flow the world over. And now if there's an alternative way for this to happen, this is not in our interest. So that ideology, I think, delayed the development of crypto in the U.S. by a lot." What changed, he said, was not just an election. "The genie is out of the bottle," is how he characterized the new consensus among policymakers. "We would probably be better off by working with it and trying to give it guardrails instead of just trying to stop it in every way that we can." That shift is what asset managers have been waiting for. "If you want to view crypto as this next major asset class that's sitting alongside fixed income, FX, then we have to build out the infrastructure that's needed for institutions," Nirup Ramalingam of the crypto infrastructure firm BridgePort said on the On The Margin podcast.
Ask Caratori for his favorite coin and he refuses on principle. "We are the big ambassadors of the diversified basket approach," he said. Some assets in the index actively compete with each other, and he likes it that way. "It serves investors to be exposed to the different use cases of crypto, not just the use case of an emerging store of wealth, which is what Bitcoin is," he said, but also the smart-contract platforms such as Ethereum and Solana. The single product that reshaped his industry was someone else's. "People were expecting it to be a success, but I think what happened after blew everybody's expectations," Caratori said of BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF, launched in January 2024. "It was the product that was fastest to get to a hundred billion dollars in assets under management," a record BlackRock has kept buying into on every dip. Hashdex competes for the same shelf space against firms with a thousand times its assets.
"Hashdex is my fourth baby," Caratori said, after his three children. He survived the 2022 crash, when revenue "fell by over half" and FTX's collapse poisoned trust across the industry. The plan now, he said, is to outlast every cycle. "We think there is tremendous advantage in building a company with a mindset of decades and never really selling it, never really just looking for the exit," Caratori said. He points to companies that reinvented themselves instead of cashing out. "Amazon began as an online bookstore. It went from that to selling everything, and from that to being perhaps the world's most important provider of cloud services," he said. He expects crypto to widen the same way, starting with finance and spreading out, the same migration that has already pushed stablecoin settlement past traditional payment rails. "Crypto, we believe, will show its value first by disrupting financial services and capital markets," Caratori said, citing stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets and prediction markets. "But we think it's gonna go beyond. It's gonna touch a number of aspects of our lives. It's how we're going to hold and use our digital identities, it's how intellectual property is going to be traded."