HYPE Price Slips Below Key Averages as Hyperliquid Courts Washington

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• HYPE has slipped below its short-term moving averages after pulling back from its September high.
• A bearish crossover between the two averages is forming but has not been confirmed.
• Hyperliquid’s CEO wants US rules to target market operators instead of the blockchain itself.
• A regulated route for American traders through Kraken’s parent company still awaits approval.

HYPE price is hovering near $79.30 on Monday, down about 8.5% over the past week and roughly 19% below the $98.16 peak it reached in September, after sellers pushed the price under both its 20-day and 50-day exponential moving averages. The pullback lands in the same week Hyperliquid Labs CEO and co-founder Jeff Yan used an interview on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast to explain how the platform could legally serve American traders, which matters for HYPE because the token’s buybacks are funded by trading fees on the network.

Two averages close to crossing

The 20-day EMA sits at $83.60 and the 50-day EMA at $82.85, a gap of less than $1 that keeps shrinking as the faster line turns lower. If the 20-day average drops beneath the 50-day, traders would read it as a bearish crossover, meaning the average price of roughly the last month has fallen below the average of the last two and a half months, and that the October selling has started to outweigh the uptrend HYPE built from early August. That signal is still pending, although the price has already spent several sessions below both lines, so the $82.85 to $83.60 band now works as a ceiling buyers would need to break through before the short-term trend can be called healthy again.

HYPE also lost the 0.382 Fibonacci retracement at $80.21. These levels measure how much of the August to September rally, which took the token from $51.15 to $98.16, has been given back, and the 0.382 line marks the point where about 38% of that gain has been erased. A return above $80.21 would be the first sign of repair, while the 0.5 retracement at $74.66, where half of the rally would be gone, is the next support buyers have to defend.

Key HYPE levels on the daily chart.

The Relative Strength Index reads 39.67, below the neutral 50 mark and under its own signal average of 43.77, which shows sellers have held the upper hand for most of the past two weeks. The reading is still above 30, the zone where a token is usually considered sold heavily enough to attract bargain hunters, so the chart still leaves room for more weakness before the token reaches levels that have historically drawn buyers back in. Volume during the October decline has also stayed well below the levels seen during the August breakout, a sign that the selling so far lacks the force of the rally that preceded it.

Yan’s case for regulating deployers

Yan said Americans who reach Hyperliquid through a VPN are breaking its terms of service, and argued that compliant US access depends on regulators understanding onchain technology well enough to judge whether it meets the CFTC’s core principles. His proposal treats the Hyperliquid blockchain like an internet protocol and places compliance duties on the firms that deploy and run markets on top of it, since those firms control listings, margin rules and who can trade. As an example of what the technology offers supervisors, he noted that anyone can verify that total user balances equal the USDC held at a given address, a live proof of funds that customers of a traditional exchange cannot check for themselves.

How the US route is being built

The pieces Yan described already exist on paper. HIP-3 lets outside builders launch their own perpetual futures markets on Hyperliquid, and on September 16 Payward, the parent company of Kraken, said it intends to deploy onchain perpetual futures for US clients starting with HIP-3* markets, a permissioned version of HIP-3 where the market operator decides who is allowed to trade. Under that plan, Bitnomial, a CFTC-regulated exchange that Payward acquired this year, would create and administer the markets and clear the contracts, while NinjaTrader Clearing would hold client accounts. American users would trade newly created contracts listed under Bitnomial’s rules, without any access to Hyperliquid’s existing order books, and the whole structure remains subject to regulatory approval.

Political backing arrived in August, when President Donald Trump said at a White House meeting that CFTC Chair Mike Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion. The legal ground is less settled. CME Group sued the CFTC in June over its approval of perpetual futures, arguing they should be regulated as swaps under the Dodd-Frank Act, and the Hyperliquid Policy Center hired former US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar to file a brief asking the court to throw the case out.

Why US access matters for HYPE

The link between regulation and the HYPE price runs through fees. Most of the trading fees Hyperliquid collects go toward buying HYPE on the open market, and builders who launch HIP-3 markets have to stake HYPE, so regulated American volume would feed both mechanisms. Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant, shared a ranking that put HYPE first among major crypto assets by analyst sentiment, about 2.3 standard deviations more bullish than the average reading, with fee-driven buybacks named as the main reason. That optimism has not stopped the token from sliding this month, and the US channel would initially cover only a subset of new contracts on Bitnomial, which limits how quickly any approval could show up in fee revenue.

The most bullish crypto asset by analyst sentiment is $HYPE. pic.twitter.com/VtqsqWSsiD

— Ki Young Ju (@ki_young_ju) October 18, 2026

Bitnomial approval and the CME case

On the chart, a daily close above $80.21 followed by a move through the EMA band would neutralize the crossover threat, while a break under $74.66 would open the way toward $69.11. On the regulatory side, the CFTC still has to clear Bitnomial’s listing, and a ruling in CME’s favor could push perpetual contracts into the heavier swaps regime, raising compliance costs for every venue planning to offer them. Hyperliquid keeps expanding offshore in the meantime: EQX Labs said on October 14 it plans to launch 11 tokenized US stock and ETF markets on the platform, including SPY, QQQ and NVIDIA, and US persons are explicitly barred from buying them.