Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin, USDH, has officially gone live following last week’s competitive ticker bid won by Native Markets. The USDH/USDC pair began trading on September 24, 2025, via Hyperliquid’s HyperCore order-book infrastructure. Ten days ago, validators selected Native Markets over rivals, including Paxos, Frax, and Agora.
In its opening hours, USDH attracted over $2 million in volume, hovering around a peg of 1.001 to USDC. Some other platforms reported as much as $2.3 million traded in the first hours. Prior to launch, more than $15 million USDH was pre-minted in 24 hours to seed liquidity.
Native issuance & incentive model
USDH is built on HyperEVM and tightly integrated into the Hyperliquid stack. It is backed by cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries. To align incentives, 50% of reserve yield is earmarked for HYPE token buybacks, and the other half supports ecosystem growth. The stablecoin also ties into a broader “Assistance Fund” to reinforce sustainability and stability.
The announcement comes amid intensifying competition from Aster DEX, which recently overtook Hyperliquid in daily revenue. Meanwhile, the native token HYPE has seen downward pressure: it declined ~4% in the 24 hours following the launch despite positive sentiment around USDH.
A push for greater independence
Just as major cloud/AI firms race to build compute capacity worldwide, DEXes and DeFi protocols are racing to internalize liquidity and control. For Hyperliquid, launching a native stablecoin is a strategic move to reduce reliance on external stablecoins (especially USDC) and to capture more of the yield generated by reserves.
Whether USDH can sustain its peg, scale liquidity, and drive meaningful adoption will be the true test of Hyperliquid’s engineering and also the market’s appetite for protocol-native stablecoins.