Hyperliquid’s HYPE token just printed a new all-time high on the back of two U.S. ETF launches, and crypto trader Michael van de Poppe thinks it could run to $100 if risk appetite holds. But here’s the twist: he’s not putting his long-term money there.
Speaking on CoinDesk’s Markets Outlook this week, van de Poppe laid out a framework that separates short-term altcoin rotations from multi-year conviction bets. Hyperliquid wins the first category. Solana wins the second. And a handful of AI tokens, he argues, remain drastically mispriced compared to their traditional-market equivalents.
Why European Traders Are Flooding Into Hyperliquid
The derivatives protocol has been drawing attention for months, but the recent surge comes down to something mundane: regulatory arbitrage. European traders can’t easily access perpetual futures on most regulated exchanges. Hyperliquid fills that gap, and the user growth shows it.
Van de Poppe described a concentration effect where liquidity in crypto markets is pooling around a small group of protocols that generate strong user growth and actual revenue. Hyperliquid sits near the top of that list right now. The protocol’s expansion into tokenized stocks, commodities, and pre-IPO assets is accelerating broader tokenization trends. That’s not just trading volume; it’s product-market fit across multiple asset classes.
The two HYPE ETFs that launched in the U.S. added fuel. ETF wrappers bring in buyers who wouldn’t otherwise touch the token directly, and institutional allocators can now get exposure without navigating decentralized exchange mechanics. For anyone tracking crypto ETF flows, this pattern should look familiar from the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF rollouts.
Van de Poppe’s $100 price target for HYPE comes with conditions. It depends on continued market appetite for risk assets. That’s not a given, especially when broader Bitcoin sentiment has cooled. Spot ETFs have bled $2.26 billion in the past two weeks, and Bitcoin itself touched $74,300 recently, more than 10% below its early May peak.
The Solana Thesis: From Degen Playground to Institutional Infrastructure
Van de Poppe isn’t dismissing Hyperliquid. He just sees a ceiling on its competitive moat. Eventually, competitors will enter the derivatives space and pressure its dominance. That’s the nature of DeFi: high margins attract copycats, and protocol-level lock-in is rare.
Solana, in his view, has a different trajectory. The network started as a haven for meme coins and speculative trading, but it’s making a transition into something more durable. Van de Poppe described this as moving from a “degen” ecosystem into a more institutional blockchain ecosystem.
What does that mean in practice? It means payment rails. It means tokenized real-world assets. It means the same enterprise use cases that Ethereum has chased for years, but on a network with lower fees and faster finality. None of this is settled, of course. Ethereum still dominates in total value locked, and Solana’s past network outages remain a talking point among skeptics. But van de Poppe is betting that Solana’s positioning as infrastructure makes it more attractive over a multi-year horizon than a derivatives protocol that could face margin compression.
This framing matters for portfolio construction. A trader rotating into HYPE is making a short-term risk-on bet. An allocator buying Solana is making a longer-term infrastructure bet. Different time horizons, different risk profiles, different exit strategies.
AI Tokens: Undervalued Relative to What?
Van de Poppe’s most provocative claim involves AI-linked crypto projects. He argues they remain deeply undervalued relative to traditional AI companies.
The comparison isn’t straightforward. AI companies in public and private markets have seen valuations balloon to levels that many analysts consider overheated. Crypto AI tokens, by contrast, have fallen sharply despite continued ecosystem growth. Van de Poppe sees that divergence as an opportunity.
He pointed to NEAR Protocol and Bittensor as the two strongest infrastructure plays tied to AI adoption. The numbers he cited for NEAR are striking: projected revenue growth from roughly $10 million in 2025 to as much as $100 million in 2026. That’s a 10x revenue expansion in a single year. If accurate, it would support a significantly higher token valuation than current prices imply.
For Bittensor, he highlighted the subnet structure and broader ecosystem expansion. His price target for TAO sits between $1,000 and $2,000 if adoption continues. That’s a wide range, and it depends on actual usage metrics that can change quickly. But the underlying thesis is that crypto offers leverage to AI trends without the valuation premiums baked into Nvidia or private AI startups.
A few caveats apply. Revenue projections for protocol tokens are notoriously unreliable. The “revenue” often comes from token emissions or fee structures that can change with governance votes. And comparing a DeFi protocol’s economics to a traditional company’s P/E ratio requires careful adjustment for tokenomics. Van de Poppe’s thesis is directionally interesting, but the specific numbers deserve scrutiny before sizing any position.
Privacy Coins Face a Regulatory Ceiling
The conversation also touched on privacy, which van de Poppe identified as one of crypto’s biggest long-term themes. Both institutional and retail users want more transactional privacy on blockchains. The problem is that governments want the opposite.
Van de Poppe was blunt about the regulatory outlook for fully anonymous privacy coins: governments are unlikely to support them. Regulators want visibility into transactions, and privacy coins have already faced mounting pressure from delistings and travel-rule requirements. European funds already face restrictions interacting with certain privacy-focused assets.
The path forward, in his view, runs through zero-knowledge proof systems and permissioned privacy models. These allow for transactional privacy at the user level while maintaining some form of regulatory compliance at the protocol level. It’s a compromise, but it’s one that institutional money can actually touch.
This doesn’t mean privacy coins are uninvestable. Short-term rallies happen, especially during risk-on rotations. But the long-term structural thesis for fully anonymous assets runs into a wall when regulators can effectively delist them from major venues.
Macro Backdrop: Yields Still Calling the Shots
All of these altcoin rotations exist within a macro framework that van de Poppe sees as yield-driven. Bond yields and central bank policy remain the biggest near-term drivers for crypto, and Japanese bond yields in particular are a signal he’s watching closely.
The logic is straightforward. Rising yields make zero-yield assets like Bitcoin less attractive on a relative basis. When you can earn 5% in Treasury bills, the opportunity cost of holding crypto increases. Falling yields reverse that calculus.
Van de Poppe doesn’t expect aggressive rate cuts or renewed monetary easing from the Federal Reserve in the near term. He also warned that additional rate hikes would pressure crypto and broader risk assets. The implication is that any altcoin rally, whether in HYPE, Solana, or AI tokens, depends on a macro environment that doesn’t turn hostile.
This creates a conditional investment thesis. If yields stabilize or fall, van de Poppe’s targets for HYPE and the AI tokens become more plausible. If inflation proves sticky and rates stay elevated, even strong fundamentals at the protocol level might not translate into token price appreciation.
For context, spot Bitcoin ETFs have now seen $2.26 billion in outflows over the past two weeks. That’s not panic selling, but it’s not conviction buying either. The altcoin market typically moves in sympathy with Bitcoin over longer periods, even when specific tokens outperform on shorter timeframes.
Van de Poppe’s framework essentially says: trade the short-term rotations if you have the risk tolerance, but keep your core allocation in assets with structural tailwinds that persist regardless of whether this quarter’s macro data cooperates. Hyperliquid might triple. It might also face margin compression from new entrants. Solana’s infrastructure thesis, by contrast, doesn’t depend on perpetual futures volume staying concentrated in one venue.
That distinction between trading and investing is easy to blur in crypto, where three-month returns can look like three-year returns in traditional markets. But the two activities require different frameworks, and van de Poppe’s interview offers a useful template for keeping them separate.
Related Reading
- Spot crypto ETFs explained
- Real-world asset tokenization, explained
- Market Analysis news
- More on Hyperliquid
- More on Solana
