HYPE trades just above the lower line of a rising wedge on the daily chart. Momentum has weakened even as the price set a higher peak in September. Hyperliquid received its first USDC reserve
HYPE traded at $93.04 on Monday, October 5, up 2.92% on the day and 3.36% on the week, with a market capitalization of $23.31 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. The token has gained about 92% since its early August low of $50.98 and sits roughly 5% below the September 22 peak of $97.90. The daily chart shows that advance compressing into a rising wedge while momentum fades. Two fundamental developments landed in the same days: Hyperliquid received 14.58 million USDC earmarked for token buybacks, and Bloomberg Terminal began showing the exchange’s markets.
HYPE holds wedge support near $91 as RSI weakens. Source: TradingView
The rally came in three stages. HYPE climbed from $50.98 to the mid-$80s by late August, then moved sideways between roughly $80 and $87 for three weeks. A mid-September dip to about $75 found buyers at the 50-day average, and the rebound carried the price to $97.90 within a week.
Connect the lows and highs of that sequence and two rising lines appear, converging toward each other. That is a rising wedge. The lower line now passes near $91 and the upper one near $100. That gap of about $9 was more than $25 wide in August.
The last pullback matters for the reading. HYPE dropped to about $86 at the end of September and stopped at $86.83, the 0.236 Fibonacci retracement of the whole advance. Sellers recovered less than a quarter of the rally before buyers returned. The price has posted higher daily closes since.
HYPE price map: levels above and below $93 ~$100Upper wedge line. A break above cancels the pattern. $97.90September 22 high, first resistance. $93.04Current price NOW ~$91Lower wedge line. A daily close below triggers the pattern. $86.83Fibonacci 0.236, where the late-September drop stopped. $83.0450-day average, the line of the medium-term uptrend. $79.98Fibonacci 0.382, support in a deeper correction.RSI stands at 59.30. That reading means buyers hold a moderate edge and the market is not overheated. The comparison with August is less comfortable. The indicator topped 80 in late August with HYPE near $85, yet reached only about 70 when the price hit $97.90 a month later. A higher price on a lower RSI peak is a bearish divergence: each new high took less buying force than the one before.
Trading volume has thinned as well. The heaviest trading of the rally came around August 20, and daily turnover has trended lower since, including during the push to the September peak.
A rising wedge with a bearish divergence and thinning volume resolves downward more often than not, though wedges also break upward. HYPE still trades about 12% above its 50-day average at $83.04, the level that separates a correction from a trend change.
On October 3, about 14.58 million USDC arrived at Hyperliquid’s system interest address. It is the first payment under the Aligned Quote Asset v2 (AQAv2) framework, which sends roughly 90% of the cost-adjusted yield earned on USDC reserves to the protocol. Circle handles the technical side of USDC on the network, and Coinbase manages the treasury side that generates the yield.
The money is destined for the Assistance Fund, which buys HYPE on the open market and sends it to an address with no private key. As of October 5, the transfer had not happened.
1USDC reserves earn yield
Done
214.58M USDC paid to Hyperliquid
Done, Oct 3
3Transfer to the Assistance Fund
Pending
4Fund buys and burns HYPE
Not started
The size is meaningful next to the existing program. Fee-funded purchases totaled about $55.67 million in September, according to FinanceFeeds, so the first reserve-yield payment equals roughly 26% of that. At $93 it would buy about 157,000 HYPE.
Two sources of HYPE buyback funding
$55.67M Trading fees, September $14.58M USDC reserve yield, first payment ~0.3% Combined, share of market cap per monthFor the price, what counts is the kind of demand this is. Fee-funded buybacks swell when trading is busy and shrink when it is quiet, which makes them weakest when the token is under pressure. Reserve yield depends on USDC balances and US interest rates, so it keeps arriving in a slow market. Together the two sources come to about $70 million a month, a steady bid that is too small to hold a chart level on its own.
Bloomberg Terminal users can now monitor select Hyperliquid markets with the command WSL HYPE, according to posts on X. The feed covers perpetuals, futures contracts with no expiry, across crypto, equities, commodities, currencies and indexes. The terminal offers no execution.
The link to HYPE runs through collateral. A desk that starts trading on Hyperliquid posts USDC, and under AQAv2 that USDC earns yield for buybacks before any trade is placed, with fees added once trading begins. Institutions still face custody, counterparty and compliance hurdles that a price screen does not remove.
The wedge leaves little room. A daily close below $91 would put $86.83 and then the 50-day average at $83.04 in play. A close above $97.90 would open a test of $100 and weaken the bearish reading of the divergence.
Supply is the counterweight to the buybacks. About 238 million HYPE, 23.8% of genesis supply, belongs to core contributors and has been unlocking monthly since late 2025, on a schedule that runs into 2027-2028. The Financial Times has noted that token repurchases across crypto have had an inconsistent effect on prices, although Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan told the newspaper they were a primary driver of HYPE’s performance.
Two dated events are worth tracking alongside the chart. The first is the onchain transfer of the 14.58 million USDC to the Assistance Fund, which marks when the new buying starts. The second is the next reserve-yield payment: the current 30-day period closes around October 25, with payment due about eight days later, in early November.
The post HYPE Price Faces Key Test as Buyback Funding Expands appeared first on ETHNews.
