HYPE Is Undervalued: Bitwise Memo Stokes 47% 7-Day Rally

gm, Defiers!

HYPE crossed $50 for the first time since September after Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan argued in a memo that Hyperliquid is targeting the $600 trillion global asset market, not the $3 trillion crypto economy. HYPE is up 47% in seven days, the best-performing large-cap of 2026.

LayerZero published its forensic post-mortem of the April KelpDAO exploit, attributing the $292M breach to DPRK group UNC4899 (TraderTraitor) — the same group linked to February's $1.5B Bybit heist. The six-week chain ran from a socially-engineered GitHub clone, through stolen session keys and forged op-geth responses on two Kubernetes clusters, to a DDoS-forced failover that let the DVN sign a valid attestation for a forged message. LayerZero is now mandating a 3-of-3 DVN default.

Three additional moves to note. Steakhouse Fi has widened its lead among Morpho vault curators to roughly $1 billion over the next-largest. CoW Swap launched on Solana using NEAR Intents as its solver backend. And MoneyGram became Tempo's anchor remittance validator, taking consensus-layer duties on TradFi robes.

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HACKS

LayerZero's Incident Report Says Kelp Downgraded From 2-of-2 to 1-of-1 DVN Before $292M Exploit

LayerZero Labs published its forensic report on the April 18 KelpDAO bridge exploit, produced with Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and zeroShadow. The breach began on March 6, when one of LayerZero's developers was socially engineered into cloning a malicious GitHub repo that dropped malware on their macOS system; the attackers used harvested session keys to access LayerZero's RPC infrastructure for six weeks before executing. On April 18, malicious code injected into op-geth on two Kubernetes clusters returned forged blockchain responses to the DVN signing service while still feeding correct data to monitoring tools; simultaneous DDoS attacks on external RPC providers forced failover to the poisoned internal servers, and the DVN signed a valid attestation for a forged message — releasing 116,500 rsETH (~$292M). Mandiant and CrowdStrike attribute the operation to UNC4899 (TraderTraitor), the DPRK group both firms tie to February's $1.5B Bybit heist. LayerZero's report also surfaces a previously unreported claim: that Kelp had at some point modified the rsETH bridge from a 2-of-2 DVN stack to a 1-of-1, leaving LayerZero Labs as the sole verifier. Kelp disputes the framing, citing LayerZero documentation and personnel sign-off, and notes industry data showing ~47% of LayerZero's 2,665 deployed applications were on 1-of-1 configurations at the time of the attack. LayerZero now refuses to sign on any channel where it is the sole verifier and is raising protocol defaults to 3-of-3.

Why this matters: Auditing the contracts found nothing, because nothing on-chain was wrong. The breach traveled through the software development lifecycle; developer endpoint, session keys, RPC layer, DVN signing infrastructure.

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DEFI

HYPE Crosses $50 for First Time Since September

HYPE crossed $50 on Wednesday for the first time since September 2025, in part fueled by a Bitwise weekly memo in which CIO Matt Hougan argued the market is undervaluing Hyperliquid. Hougan framed Hyperliquid as a venue moving beyond crypto perps into commodities, S&P 500 futures, pre-IPO stocks, and prediction markets, with non-crypto assets expected to grow from nearly half to 70% of platform volume over time; making the addressable market the $600 trillion global asset book, not the $3 trillion crypto economy. Hougan estimated Hyperliquid is generating $800M-$1B in annualized revenue and is trading at 10-14x its buyback stream, a multiple he argued compares favorably with CME and Robinhood. The rally is reinforced by Trade.xyz's synthetic SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, which opened at a $1.78T reference valuation and traded as high as $216 before settling. HYPE is up 47% in seven days, the best-performing large-cap of 2026 per CoinGecko.

Why this matters: Hougan's framing is the institutional thesis: Hyperliquid is not a crypto exchange that happens to be on-chain, it is an exchange whose addressable market is the global derivatives book.

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DEFI

Steakhouse Fi Pulls $1 Billion Lead Over Competing Morpho Vault Curators

Steakhouse Fi has widened its lead among Morpho vault curators to roughly $1 billion ahead of the second-largest, per Token Terminal. Morpho operates a curator model in which competing vault managers attract liquidity by offering different risk-return profiles. Steakhouse Fi's dominant position signals it has either successfully differentiated its strategies or captured outsized user confidence within the ecosystem.

Why this matters: Morpho's curator model is supposed to function as a competitive market for risk pricing, with multi-curator competition disciplining rate-setting and parameter choices.

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DEFI

CoW Swap Expands to Solana With NEAR Intents Backend Support

CoW Swap is expanding to Solana using NEAR Intents as backend infrastructure to power the intent-based DEX on the chain. CoW Swap operates on a Coincidence of Wants model, in which trading intents are settled through batch auctions rather than traditional AMM mechanics. NEAR Intents provides the underlying intent-solving infrastructure, enabling the model to operate across blockchains. The launch broadens CoW Swap's multichain presence beyond Ethereum and positions NEAR Intents as the solver backend for intent-based applications across networks.

Why this matters: Intent-based DEXes have been an Ethereum phenomenon - CoW Swap, UniswapX, 1inch Fusion - because the architecture leans on Ethereum's transaction model and a deep solver market. The SVM's execution semantics don't translate cleanly, which is why Solana's native DEX stack (Jupiter, Phoenix) has stayed AMM-centric.

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