- NYSE owner ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher said he has held multiple meetings with Hyperliquid and discussed possible partnerships.
- Hyperliquid’s SpaceX pre-IPO perpetuals gave traders synthetic exposure before listing, while ICE kept studying the platform’s 24/7 price discovery.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), is now openly exploring potential collaboration with Hyperliquid after weeks of regulatory friction around the decentralized derivatives venue.
Speaking at Bernstein’s Strategic Decisions Conference, ICE chief executive Jeffrey Sprecher said he had met with the Hyperliquid team many times to discuss where the two sides might overlap and work together.
In the same appearance, he described Hyperliquid as “bigger than Nasdaq” and said the 11-person team behind it had built something that traditional markets could not ignore.
He added:
“By the way, the number of billionaires that are being created doing this. This Hyperliquid we are talking about—If you haven’t heard about it, it’s bigger than NASDAQ, okay?”
That shift matters given the stance ICE and CME had taken earlier this month. Earlier this month, the two exchanges had urged U.S. regulators to crack down on Hyperliquid, warning that its anonymous perpetual futures market could create manipulation and sanctions-evasion risks, especially in oil-related trading.
Sprecher addressed that tension directly at Bernstein, saying the criticism had been misread and adding that ICE was engaging with Hyperliquid rather than reacting from fear.
Sprecher also tied Hyperliquid’s rise to a structural market gap that traditional exchanges have struggled to close. He pointed to weekend oil trading, noting that Hyperliquid had activity when legacy venues were dark and major Iran-related developments were unfolding.
Around the same period, ICE itself announced that ICE Brent and ICE WTI perpetual futures would launch on OKX, a move that brought the perpetual model into a more traditional commodities setting even as the company was still pressing its concerns about Hyperliquid in Washington.
SpaceX Shows Why Hyperliquid is Drawing Wall Street Attention
One reason Hyperliquid is now harder for Wall Street to dismiss is its role in pre-IPO price discovery. On May 18, Trade.xyz launched a SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual on Hyperliquid at a $150 reference price, implying a valuation of about $1.78 trillion. HYPE rose 9% after the launch, while the contract spiked to $216 within hours as traders moved into the market. These contracts do not represent actual equity ownership, but they do give traders a way to speculate on private-company valuations before public listing.
That market has not been smooth. A separate alert circulated this week revealed that SpaceX-related perpetuals on Hyperliquid briefly fell about 45%, from roughly $2,280 to $1,280, in a move linked to a possible index-price glitch on the HIP-3 market run by Ventuals.
The sudden drop triggered more than $1.5 million in liquidations across leveraged long positions. Even so, the episode reinforced Sprecher’s broader point from Bernstein. Institutions may not be trading on-chain directly, but they are still watching the price discovery taking place there.
The broader attraction is not limited to one contract. SpaceX is expected to price its IPO in June, and those offshore crypto venues are already drawing demand from traders seeking early exposure. The exchanges, including Trade.xyz and others, have rushed to offer derivatives tied to SpaceX ahead of that listing, confirming that synthetic pre-IPO markets are becoming a real product category.
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid is drawing pressure from legacy market players as it expands beyond crypto perpetuals into new trading categories. Now the platform is pushing further into Polymarket’s territory by launching offchain prediction markets that settle through its own validator network.
