HYPE climbs past $90 to record high as Hyperliquid turns on manual borrowing
Users can now post HYPE and Bitcoin as collateral against USDC and USDt, with $269 million already borrowed through the platform's lending infrastructure.
Illustration · generated, not a photograph
HYPE, the token powering the Hyperliquid layer-1 blockchain and its decentralized trading platform, reached an all-time high of $90.92 on Friday, hours after the protocol switched on manual borrowing for its users.
The new capability allows anyone to deposit HYPE or Bitcoin and take out loans denominated in USDC or Tether's USDt. Until now, that kind of direct borrowing was only available inside Hyperliquid's portfolio-margin setup, which bundles a trader's positions into a single collateral pool.
"Manual borrows are live on Hyperliquid," the protocol said in its announcement. Co-founder Jeff Yan explained that each borrowed asset is drawn from an actual supplier rather than generated through margin accounting on the platform side — a distinction he tied to the fact that the feature and the portfolio-margin system run on the same HyperCore infrastructure.
$269 million already on the books
Hyperliquid reported $269 million in borrowed assets across that shared infrastructure as of Friday. The figure suggests lenders had already positioned capital on the platform ahead of the manual-borrow launch, giving the new front door immediate depth.
The token's price reaction was swift. HYPE jumped to its record shortly after the announcement crossed, extending a run that has kept the asset near the top of this week's market movers.
The launch also lands in the middle of a broader expansion phase for Hyperliquid. Two days earlier, on Wednesday, Payward — the parent company of Kraken — said it plans to run onchain perpetual futures markets for United States clients, with Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets as the starting point.
Together, the two developments point to Hyperliquid pushing deeper into both lending and regulated-market distribution at the same time, with its native token absorbing the news.
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