Valantis Acquires StakedHype Protocol to Strengthen Hyperliquid’s Liquidity Staking Landscape

Hyperliquid Ecosystem Decentralized Trading Platform Valantis Labs Announces Acquisition of Stakedhype Protocol

Valantis Labs announced on Tuesday the acquisition of the liquidity staking protocol Stakedhype. Stakedhype allows users to lock up Hyperliquid tokens HYPE and receive liquidity staking tokens Staked HYPE (stHYPE), with a current total locked value (TVL) of approximately $181 million.

stHYPE is one of the major liquidity staking tokens in the Hyperliquid DeFi market, which has a scale of about $2.7 billion, with its main competitor being kHYPE launched by Kinetiq, which has a locked value of about $1.3 billion.

This transaction is particularly significant in the liquidity staking market of Hyperliquid, as Valantis operates one of the largest decentralized exchanges in the ecosystem and provides liquidity pools for both stHYPE and kHYPE.

By acquiring Stakedhype, Valantis will become the issuer of stHYPE tokens while continuing to operate the main liquidity pool for its competitor’s liquidity staking tokens. However, Valantis CEO Deven Matthews emphasized that this move will not distort the market.

Matthews stated in an interview with DL News:

Matthews also mentioned that competitors can shape their positioning by designing differentiated features, such as trading fee discounts, staking reward distributions, and other clever token design aspects.

Improving Liquidity and Returns

stHYPE once dominated the Hyperliquid liquidity staking market, reaching a scale of $500 million, but has now been surpassed by the emerging kHYPE.

Matthews stated that Valantis will “prioritize addressing the most common pain points of stHYPE,” specifically by improving liquidity and introducing new sources of returns for investors.

Matthews remarked:

This acquisition comes at a time when Hyperliquid has rapidly risen this year to become one of the most notable cryptocurrency projects. However, compared to the overall scale of the DeFi liquidity staking market (approximately $77 billion), Hyperliquid still has significant room for growth.

According to data from TradingView, HYPE has risen about 76% so far this year, with a trading price of $42 as of the time of publication.