London, UK - August 27, 2026 - Valantis and Pendle have launched an open market that separates Hyperliquid trading fee discounts from the HYPE tokens that previously granted them, allowing any trader to purchase reduced-fee tiers without purchasing HYPE itself, and enabling HYPE stakers to sell those discounts to earn additional yield.
Until now, discounts on Hyperliquid were accessible largely by staking the native token HYPE or through privately negotiated arrangements. Valantis - the liquid staking and trading platform centered on stHYPE - integrated with Pendle to make the discount a standalone, tradable asset. That change makes it the first time a Hyperliquid fee discount has been unbundled from the underlying token and assigned an independent market price.
How Hyperliquid fee discounts function
Hyperliquid operates as an onchain exchange for perpetual futures where each trade incurs a fee. Traders can obtain a reduced fee schedule by staking HYPE: the amount of HYPE staked directly determines the fee reduction. Discount tiers start at 10 HYPE for a 5% discount and scale up to 500,000 HYPE for a 40% discount. Valantis' analysis indicates that the top 20,000 Hyperliquid traders collectively realize about $40 million a year in savings from staking-based discounts, and that approximately 5% of circulating HYPE is staked by traders for the purpose of obtaining those reductions.
Valantis also estimates that making the discount more broadly accessible could unlock between $100 million and $300 million in additional annual savings for traders. The firm highlights that many active traders prefer to keep capital available for margin rather than lock it into staking to reduce fees; roughly half of the top 20,000 traders do not stake at all, and this cohort pays about 70% of all trading fees.
Earlier this year Valantis launched Valantis Prime, a trading layer that allows stHYPE holders to receive the same staking discounts while continuing to use the token as margin on lending platforms such as Hyperlend and Morpho. That approach was designed to remove the capital lockup that discouraged staking and kept many traders from accessing fee reductions.
The new HYPE Fees Marketplace
Before the public market, a private secondary market developed organically: large market makers and protocols arranged bilateral deals to access HYPE and the discounts it confers. The article notes that Hyperion DeFi, a Nasdaq-listed company which holds HYPE as a treasury asset, has committed HYPE to large trading wallets in exchange for a share of revenue derived from trading fee savings.
Valantis and Pendle have taken that fragmented activity and made it permissionless. Valantis Prime smart contracts extend staking discounts to holders of stHYPE, and Pendle’s infrastructure splits the discount from the underlying stHYPE into tradable components. As a result, fee discounts can now be purchased by any trader and sold by any HYPE holder.
Operationally, stHYPE yield tokens (YTs) now represent the market price for a Hyperliquid fee discount. The initial market opened on August 27, 2026 and is set to expire on January 28, 2027; the teams plan to launch a follow-on market before that expiry. Traders may acquire stHYPE YTs on Pendle and activate a Trading Discount through prime.valantis.xyz.
"Hyperliquid is leading the frontier on token utility. There is more than $40 million a year in fee savings sitting on Hyperliquid, and until today none of it could be bought, sold, or priced," said Deven Matthews, co-founder and CEO of Valantis Labs. "A trader who needs lower fees can now rent them. A holder who doesn’t can sell them and earn more for it. That is what a market is for, and we think it is the first of many pieces of token utility that will end up priced this way."
What Valantis and Pendle say about the product
Valantis describes itself as a liquid staking and trading ecosystem on Hyperliquid built around stHYPE, the network's first liquid staking token. stHYPE allows holders to collect staking rewards while maintaining the token’s utility across decentralized finance (DeFi), including access to Hyperliquid’s staking-derived benefits and market deployment mechanisms. Valantis Prime is the trading layer intended to bring those staking discounts to stHYPE holders without requiring withdrawal from Hyperliquid’s exchange.
Pendle is characterized as a protocol focused on tokenizing and trading yield. It separates yield-bearing assets into principal and yield components, enabling markets for fixed rates, yield speculation, and tokenized utility across chains including Ethereum, Arbitrum, and HyperEVM.
Market access and timelines
The public launch on August 27, 2026 provides an onchain route for traders to access discounted fee tiers without acquiring HYPE. The market's stated expiry date is January 28, 2027, and a new market is planned to open ahead of that expiration. Traders interested in acquiring discounts can purchase stHYPE YTs through Pendle and then activate discounts at the Valantis Prime interface.
Contact
For inquiries, Valantis lists CEO Deven Matthews and provides a contact email: [email protected].
Note: This article reports on the structure, timing, and mechanics of the new market as described by Valantis and Pendle. It does not add information beyond what those parties disclosed about the product, the market’s opening and expiry dates, or the figures and estimates provided by Valantis.