- HYPE is holding its 2026 rising channel near $79 despite an 8.5% weekly drop.
- Payward, Kraken’s parent, plans to deploy US perpetual futures on Hyperliquid through HIP-3.
- Bitnomial and NinjaTrader Clearing would carry the regulatory obligations while Hyperliquid runs the onchain order book.
- The plan is a stated intention, not a live product, and access would be limited to allowlisted accounts.
Hyperliquid’s HYPE token is trading near $79 on the weekly chart, holding inside the ascending channel it has traced since the start of 2026, even after a roughly 8.5% slide over the past seven days. The retreat came as the U.S. Senate blocked the CLARITY Act on September 15, a setback that pulled the wider crypto market lower and briefly sent Bitcoin toward $75,000. On the same stretch, Payward, the parent company of Kraken, said on September 16 that it intends to deploy onchain perpetual futures for U.S. clients on Hyperliquid, using the protocol’s HIP-3 permissioned markets. The two events point in opposite directions: one closed a regulatory door in Congress, the other opened a regulated commercial path around it.
One weekly close under $73.32 changes the whole picture
The weekly candle shows HYPE changing hands around $79.18, up 2.39% while it forms, after the previous weeks pulled the price back from a high close to $90. That high sits at the top of the Fibonacci retracement drawn from the $20.18 swing low to the $89.74 swing high, and the current price still holds above the first retracement level at $73.32. As long as that line survives on a weekly close, the pullback reads as shallow rather than a change of trend.
The two moving averages are stacked in the order a healthy uptrend wants: shorter above longer, with room between them. The 20-week average sits at $65.29, well clear of the 50-week average at $46.49. When the shorter average trades that far above the longer one, it means the token’s recent average price is running well ahead of its longer-run base, and the medium-term trend still favors buyers. Price at $79 also sits above both, leaving a cushion of roughly $14 down to the 20-week line before that support even comes into play.
Momentum has cooled without breaking down. The 14-week RSI reads about 62, above the 50 mark that separates buyers from sellers but short of the 70 level where an asset is usually called overbought. The RSI line and its own signal average have converged near 62, which shows the earlier push toward 70 has flattened. There is still headroom before momentum looks stretched, and last week’s dip has not dragged it into weak territory. A weekly close under $73.32 would open the next reference at $63.17, which roughly lines up with the 20-week average, and below that $54.96 and $46.75 mark the levels that would put the channel itself in question.
Why Payward wants to hold the keys to a Hyperliquid market
Payward is positioning itself as the first regulated US name to do this. In its statement from Cheyenne, Wyoming, the company said multiple venues already run builder-deployed perpetuals on Hyperliquid, that one of them holds 98% of the open interest, and that no registered U.S. exchange or clearinghouse has deployed a market there. Payward said it intends to be that first registered entity, holding the keys and carrying the regulatory obligations. “We already list our own US perpetuals and intend to deploy on Hyperliquid as well, putting clients first, not ourselves,” said Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward.
Payward 🤝 @HyperliquidX
We're building permissioned Hyperliquid HIP-3* markets for US clients. pic.twitter.com/D9WwRgVaK0
— Payward (@Payward) September 16, 2026
This is not a startup reaching for its first license. It has operated open financial rails since 2011, serves clients across more than 190 countries and territories, and reported 6.6 million funded accounts as of June 30, with a third-party review of its Proof of Reserves showing client assets backed above 100%. That footprint is the pitch: a regulated operator with an existing U.S. derivatives stack extending it onto a public blockchain.
The structure splits the work across three regulated parts. The market runs on Hyperliquid’s public blockchain, while two CFTC-registered Payward entities carry the obligations. Only accounts that NinjaTrader has onboarded, and that sit on both NinjaTrader’s and Bitnomial’s allowlists, could place a trade.
Access sits behind that allowlist because of how HIP-3 works in its permissioned form, announced as HIP-3* and built around onchain allowlists that a deployer controls. The framework also carries a cost of entry that ties back to the token, since a deployer has to stake 500,000 HYPE to run a market, one reason the arrangement matters for HYPE demand and not only for Kraken’s product line. Centralized exchanges like Binance climbed to the top of the trading stack because they offered the deepest liquidity and the fastest execution, with access that asked little of the user. Hyperliquid’s argument is that an onchain order book can deliver that same execution while leaving custody with the trader and settlement open to inspection, and Payward’s move puts a regulated U.S. name behind that argument for the first time.
The 49-50 CLARITY vote hands the initiative back to the CFTC
The CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that would have divided crypto oversight between the SEC and the CFTC in law, failed its first Senate floor test on September 15 by 49 votes to 50, short of the 60 needed to advance and short even of a simple majority. Every Democrat and four Republicans voted against it. With the bill stalled, U.S. digital-asset policy keeps running on agency discretion rather than statute, and that is precisely the lane Payward is using through CFTC-regulated entities that are already licensed and supervised under existing rules. A firm that holds those licenses does not have to wait for Congress to bring a product to U.S. clients.
CME’s swaps challenge still sits between the plan and a live trade
Payward stated an intention rather than announcing a launch, and it had already outlined the structure to the CFTC in the weeks before, so the first version would be a controlled route for approved accounts through regulated intermediaries rather than open retail access. A separate legal question hangs over the whole category. CME Group has challenged how the CFTC treats perpetual contracts, arguing they belong under the Dodd-Frank Act as swaps rather than as ordinary listed futures, a dispute that surfaced after the CFTC cleared Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual in May. How that classification lands would shape what a HIP-3 deployer can list and for whom. The legislative calendar offers little near-term relief either, with the House having canceled its scheduled weeks of September 21 and 28 and the Senate breaking for its state work period on October 5, ahead of the November 3 election, which leaves the agency track as the only moving piece for the rest of the year.