渠道向发行方收税，Hyperliquid如何撬开Circle的钱袋子？

Original Author: Xiaobing, Shenchao TechFlow

On May 14, Coinbase and Circle jointly announced that they would re-enter Hyperliquid under the "AQAv2" framework, with Coinbase becoming the treasury deployer for USDC and returning most of the yield generated by USDC reserves to the Hyperliquid protocol. Native Markets' USDH agreed to have its brand assets acquired by Coinbase and will gradually phase out.

Sounds like an ordinary partnership announcement? Not quite.

Here are the specific numbers: The USDC balance on Hyperliquid is approximately $5 billion. At current treasury yields, this generates about $200 million in reserve income annually. According to leaked partnership details, after deducting "costs," approximately 90% of the reserve income will flow back to the Hyperliquid ecosystem, expected to boost protocol revenue by 22%–26%.

This is the largest concession an issuer has ever made to a single channel in the history of the stablecoin industry. Before this, only Coinbase (as a co-issuer, taking over half of Circle's distribution revenue), Binance, and a handful of undisclosed partners could receive revenue-sharing from Circle.

And Hyperliquid is a decentralized protocol with no equity relationship, no co-issuance history, and even a vague legal entity.

Why did it get this deal?

The Power Play

To understand this transaction, we need to go back to September 2025.

At that time, Hyperliquid was still using bridged USDC as its primary collateral asset. The USDC balance had already approached $6 billion, accounting for 7.5% of USDC's total circulating supply. At then-current interest rates, this $6 billion contributed about $220 million in annual reserve income to Circle, while Hyperliquid received nothing.

One KOL commented: "Hyperliquid holds $5.5 billion USDC, generating $220 million in annual revenue for Circle. After USDH launches, it can capture $110 million of that within the protocol. No new products, no new users needed – just redistributing reserve income from Circle shareholders to HYPE holders."

So the Hyperliquid team did something extremely clever: Instead of issuing their own stablecoin, they put the "USDH" ticker up for public bidding. Paxos, Ethena, Frax, Sky, Agora, Native Markets – half of the stablecoin ecosystem jumped into the bidding. The bidding conditions all revolved around "how much reserve income you can return to the Hyperliquid ecosystem," with almost all bidders offering a 95%–100% revenue-sharing ratio.

In the end, the community awarded the ticker to Native Markets, a team founded by Mary-Catherine Lader (former COO of Uniswap Labs) and specifically tailored for Hyperliquid. The allocation was set at 50% for HYPE buybacks and 50% for ecosystem incentives.

The true power of this move wasn't that USDH could replace USDC (in fact, eight months after launch, USDH's scale remained far below USDC's). Instead, it held a knife to Circle and Coinbase:

Either you accept this "protocol sovereignty" rulebook and give up the income, or we gradually replace you.

Coinbase's reaction was telling. It didn't form a "united front" with Circle, but instead directly took over USDH's brand assets and "copied" the entire AQA framework into the USDC system. On the surface, Coinbase acted to preserve USDC's home turf. In essence, Coinbase admitted: The rules of the game have changed; concessions must be made.

On the day of Coinbase's announcement, Native Markets co-founder Mary-Catherine Lader tweeted: "When we won USDH 8 months ago, our thesis was simple. People care about stablecoins that pass value back to the networks and users. Today, that thesis was validated."

She was being too polite. This was a meticulously designed, textbook-level transfer of power within the industry chain.

What Has This Changed?

Layer 1: The Era of "Channel Revenue Sharing" for USDC Reserve Income Has Officially Begun

For the past decade, the business model for stablecoin issuers has been brutally simple: Users mint stablecoins → Issuer buys U.S. Treasuries with the dollars → All income goes to the issuer. Circle alone used this model to generate $2.6 billion in reserve income in 2025, supporting a $30 billion IPO valuation.

This model rested on an assumption: Issuers are scarce; channels are abundant. As the two deepest stablecoins in terms of liquidity, CEXs and DEXs would beg USDT and USDC to be listed.

Hyperliquid proved that when a channel becomes large enough (accounting for 7.5% of USDC's circulating supply), and has the ability to launch its own stablecoin to replace you at any time, the power dynamic is reversed. The issuer becomes the subordinate party in a battle for scarce resources.

What happens next? Just look at Circle's recently filed Q1 financial report: $2.637 billion in reserve income for 2025, the absolute pillar of its revenue. If future channels like Binance, OKX, Bybit, Phantom on Solana, or even major Ethereum L2s come to the table with this "AQA playbook," Circle's profit statement will be shaved thinner and thinner.

CRCL's stock price has already reacted to this anxiety. On May 14, it peaked at $132.44 during trading but closed at $122.34, a 7.6% drop from its intraday high. The market cast its vote with real money: short-term bullish (USDC expands its territory on Hyperliquid), long-term bearish (the revenue-sharing model becomes institutionalized).

Layer 2: HYPE Gains a True "Cash Flow Anchor"

Many haven't realized that this transaction is a structural upgrade for HYPE's valuation logic.

Before, HYPE's value proposition was: Trading fees → Aid fund → Buyback and burn. This model relied on trading volume, which is cyclical and highly volatile.

Now there's an additional leg: Treasury yields → Protocol revenue → HYPE buybacks. This leg doesn't depend on market sentiment or trading activity. It depends on just one thing: how many dollars are locked on Hyperliquid.

This is a very different kind of cash flow. Its nature is closer to a bank's net interest margin than an exchange's trading fees. The latter fluctuates wildly with bull and bear markets; the former provides a steady inflow as long as interest rates don't hit zero and the deposit balance doesn't vanish.

A simple calculation based on current scale: $5 billion × ~4% treasury yield × 90% revenue share ≈ $180 million in new annual protocol revenue. With this money entirely used for HYPE buybacks and the aid fund, for a token with a circulating market cap of around $15 billion, this means an additional annual "passive deflation" of over 1%, and this pool is growing at a year-over-year doubling rate.

HYPE rose 14% on the day of the news. The market reaction was correct. But more noteworthy than the day's price increase is HYPE's valuation model migration from an "exchange token" to a "sovereign stablecoin treasury yield distribution certificate."

The latter is a completely different asset class for which the market has no pricing framework yet.

Layer 3: USDC's "Neutrality" Begins to Unravel

This is the most easily overlooked but potentially most profound layer.

Stablecoins serve as the settlement layer for the crypto world by relying on neutrality. USDC theoretically treats all chains, exchanges, and applications equally. This is what differentiates it from banks: banks have customer tiers; stablecoins do not.

But the terms of the AQAv2 agreement for Hyperliquid are different from USDC's terms on Ethereum mainnet, Solana, or Arbitrum. Hyperliquid gets a 90% reserve income share, and Circle and Coinbase must even stake HYPE as validators. This is a highly customized, deeply integrated relationship.

So the question arises: When USDC offers different economic terms to different networks, can it still be considered a 'neutral' settlement layer?

Every channel with bargaining power will start demanding its own "special terms." Won't Solana demand it? Won't Base? Won't Arbitrum? USDC will ultimately become a highly fragmented "revenue-sharing network" stitched together from dozens of bilateral agreements.

This is the true legacy of USDH. It didn't lose to USDC; it forced USDC to become USDH.

The co-founder of Native Markets captured the real meaning in their statement: "USDH may be disappearing, but its core innovation already won because Coinbase is adopting the underlying economics."

Deep Tide Viewpoint

From a trader's perspective, the most interesting part isn't HYPE up 14%, nor is it CRCL down 7%. The most interesting part is: Every time in financial history when a 'channel reverse prices the upstream,' the final outcome has been very similar.

Visa and Mastercard can continuously capture the thickest chunk of profits in the card network industry because they are the channels. Commercial banks are ultimately willing to share revenue with Walmart and Costco for co-branded credit cards because without the end terminal, there are no transactions. Apple's 30% App Store commission is essentially channels taxing developers.

But the other side of the story is: When a channel grows to a certain critical mass, it begins to cannibalize upstream profits. Costco's private brand Kirkland has become a top-of-mind consumer product. Spotify forced record labels to accept the subscription model. Steam compelled publishers to accept a 30% cut while also conceding refund rights.

Crypto's stablecoins were previously stuck in the "upstream calls the shots" phase. What Hyperliquid did has forcibly pushed the industry into the next phase: 'the channel calls the shots.'

In the short term, this is just a transaction. In the medium term, this marks the beginning of a structural segmentation of Circle's business model. In the long term, this is the inflection point for stablecoins moving from "issuer sovereignty" to "network sovereignty." Stablecoins no longer belong solely to the company that issues them; they start to belong to the network where they settle.

Those who think this is just Hyperliquid winning a single round haven't seen that the real poker table has already been overturned.

Who will be the next to act? My bet is on Solana, and it won't be long.