Felix went live with our first product (Felix CDP) on April 8, 2025. It has been less than a year since Felix launched, but we figured with the calendar year closing, it would be good to recap where we’ve been and share where we’re going in 2026.

Felix 2025 Wrapped

In 2025, we launched:

  1. Felix CDP
  2. Felix Vanilla
  3. USDhl
  4. Felix Exchange via HIP-3

Each of these products brought new learnings on user needs and further expanded the Felix user base. Felix CDP saw rapid growth at launch, expanding from $0 to ~$200m TVL in about 6 weeks post-launch. feUSD was minted in order to long HYPE which was rising from $9 -> $30 at that time. This led to excess sell pressure on feUSD, many redemptions, and users looking for a simpler alternative that didn’t require constant rate adjustments. This led to the launch of Felix Vanilla, which our team had been working on since November 2024. Felix Vanilla, built with @Morpho, was created to offer a more “vanilla” borrow/lend experience for Felix users. Vanilla has now become the primary borrow/lend product in the Felix ecosystem, with roughly $520m in deposits to close the year. Felix CDP + Vanilla crossed $1bn in deposits in September of 2025 with HYPE at all-time highs; this deposits dollar amount is since down to roughly $600m with HYPE down to ~$24.

Additionally, we launched USDhl in June and Felix Exchange in November. USDhl was built to drive treasury revenue from stablecoins on Hyperliquid (primarily USDC) back to Hyperliquid via HYPE buybacks distributed to users. USDhl saw fast early growth to about $30m in supply but then faded as it did not have the ability to be used as a quote asset and had no major utility except for holding/lending to earn the rewards yield--maybe it was too early, but our team has since shifted focus from it and now supports USDH from @nativemarkets.

Our team began work on Felix Exchange with HIP-3 perp market deployment in May of 2025 and launched in November after the launch of HIP-3 in October. The primary use case of Felix CDP + Vanilla since launch has been to borrow against HYPE and other more volatile assets to trade more on Hyperliquid. Because of this, we wanted to verticalize our offering and deploy the markets users want to trade with their borrowed capital from Felix. Additionally, we saw an early opening for more RWAs coming onchain with more favorable US regulation and better modes of price data for perps. This led to our focus on RWA perps. So far we have launched six markets with more on the way in the new year. The largest of these markets by open interest are GOLD-USDH and SILVER-USDH, becoming prime venues to trade these metals onchain as they reach all-time highs.

Felix 2026

Heading into 2026, we will be expanding the lending product offering and bringing more markets live on Hyperliquid via Felix Exchange and HIP-3. There are a few primary questions we are discussing heading into the new year:

What is the current TAM for RWA perps and RWAs onchain more generally? Are we early in a growing market? Are we in a market that has seen initial growth due to being “in the narrative” but may face stagnation heading into 2026? How should we position Felix for this market?

  1. Over the past year, crypto alts have been severely disappointing leading many traders who turned profit in 2024/2025 to turn to RWAs offchain to close the year. We expect this to be a trend that continues in 2026 given the latent bloat in tokens that have little real economic value backing them and alt token teams that are apparently no longer innovating like they once were. Because of this, we think the onchain RWA market may be at a small peak now with end of year capital rotating but that this shift to RWAs onchain (both in perps and spot form) will continue next year as more users get easier access to equities, commodities, and fixed income instruments onchain.

What is the best allocation of resources across the organization for what we are currently working on? Are we leaning into what users want most, or are we fragmenting with undue experimentation? What are the most valuable problems we can solve in Q1/Q2 2026?

  1. This question forces our team to strip away products we think could be “cool” or interesting to launch but have less market viability long term. In 2026, we see demand for more spot RWAs coming onchain in ways that don’t rely on liquidity pools for trade execution. This along with further novel perp market deployments and a new product on Felix borrow/lend will be prime focuses for early 2026.

If HYPE trends downward in 2026, what does borrow/lend look like towards the end of Q1, and how can we ensure durability of the business?

  1. This question is in large part why we feel it is important to not place the entirety of the business as a HYPE beta bet and must involve other products like RWA perps and expanding the Hyperliquid TAM as opposed to solely relying on HL Labs to bring in net-new users. Further distribution outside of HL natives will be a focus of Felix in early 2026. Expand the pie.

RWA perps is inevitably a competitive landscape across Hyperliquid and more generally across DeFi–what is our unique + valuable position in this market?

  1. Felix has leaned into our positioning as the USDH exchange. USDH’s benefits on cost became less significant with the enabling of Growth Mode driving fees to near 0. However, we think USDH can become the primary onramp/offramp asset for Hyperliquid, which would be a greater catalyst for USDH adoption along with 1) the growth of USDH as a key lend asset on Felix Vanilla and 2) more desired USDH markets being launched via Felix on HIP-3.

In 2026, we will continue to focus on trading and lending infrastructure to serve the power trader. These questions above are helping guide where we place time, emphasis, and engineering heading into this next chapter of Felix. We are grateful for the many users who choose Felix today--looking forward to shipping for you in 2026.