LAGUNA HILLS, Calif., Jan. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hyperion DeFi, Inc. (NASDAQ:HYPD) ("Hyperion DeFi" or the "Company") today issued a letter to shareholders from its Chief Executive Officer, Hyunsu Jung.

To the shareholders of Hyperion DeFi, Inc.:

Let me start by expressing my sincere gratitude to those sharing in our journey to become the leading Hyperliquid-native Decentralized Finance ("DeFi") company. As I formally step into the CEO role at Hyperion DeFi, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what we've built in 2025 and what we look to accomplish in 2026.

On June 17, 2025 we underwent a massive transformation from Eyenovia, a company building ophthalmic technology, to Hyperion DeFi – the first U.S. publicly listed company holding HYPE, the native token of the Hyperliquid blockchain, on its balance sheet. Last summer, while most Digital Asset Treasury ("DAT") companies launched with the standard "buy-and-hold" strategy, we moved with speed and precision to deploy our treasury asset to establish differentiated business lines and strengthen our operational positioning:

Within 8 days of completing our $50 million PIPE, Hyperion DeFi established the "Kinetiq x Hyperion" validator, with our partners Kinetiq and Pier Two, to earn staking rewards on our HYPE position while actively securing the Hyperliquid network;
Within 30 days of our transformation, we became the first institution to have its own Liquid Staking Token (LST) called HiHYPE (Hyperion Institutional HYPE), which is used to engage in the HyperEVM, a network of smart contract applications built on Hyperliquid;
By September, we designed and entered our first HYPE Asset Use Service ("HAUS") Agreement with proprietary trading firm Credo, onboarding an institutional client to trade on Hyperliquid with the benefit of reduced trading fees;
That same month, we announced the appointment of David Knox, the former Head of Capital Markets and Head of Finance for Global Credit and Financial Services at PayPal, as our Chief Financial Officer;
In October, we announced a strategic partnership with Felix to launch a "HIP-3" exchange, allocating 500,000 HYPE to enable users globally to trade equities and commodities, 24/7, on Hyperliquid, creating a revenue stream that is agnostic to both the price of HYPE and the performance of crypto markets;
In November, we announced third quarter 2025 financial results, with a record net income of $6.6 million, the most generated in the company's 10+ year history;
In addition, we received our first major token airdrop of KNTQ for our utilization of the Kinetiq platform, which by extension, provides HYPD shareholders with exposure to the growth of Kinetiq;
And finally in December, we announced our partnership with Native Markets, allocating 300,000 HYPE to support the "Aligned Quote Asset" incentive for the USDH stablecoin.

Our actions showcase our firm belief: we win by positioning Hyperliquid and its ecosystem to win. We trust in the Hyperliquid core team to continue building an exceptional on-chain product in HyperCore, while improving the infrastructure on HyperEVM so that our partners can continue to develop applications that can serve retail and institutional users.

Hyperion DeFi plays a critical role in this ecosystem. We will continue to deploy our HYPE through various protocols and partnerships that support the growth of Hyperliquid-native primitives and establish diversified revenue streams from doing so. As our products and strategies become further integrated into the Hyperliquid ecosystem, our DeFi flywheel should accelerate, while simultaneously, Hyperliquid's platform expands to service an increasingly on-chain global user base. But what backs our conviction – and our fidelity to this thesis – as we concentrate our efforts here?

Fundamentals Matter

Hyperliquid's protocol revenues in 2025 showcase what is possible when next-generation infrastructure is built using blockchain rails: Hyperliquid became the highest revenue-generating blockchain network, accounting for over 30% of all blockchain fees at its peak in Q3 2025. More importantly, it allocated ~97% of those revenues to autonomously buying back and burning the HYPE token, removing ~13% of the circulating supply by the end of 2025. For Hyperion DeFi, as a company holding a significant quantity of HYPE on its balance sheet, this is a structural tailwind that simply does not exist in other blockchain ecosystems. Pair this with HYPE's fixed supply of 1 billion tokens and one can imagine what happens when supply-and-demand mechanics are in full effect.

Despite strong fundamentals, a major question persists: can Hyperliquid sustain its position as the market leader for on-chain perpetuals, especially as the landscape becomes more competitive with the launch of other decentralized exchanges? Having been in this space for nearly a decade, I have seen numerous projects come and go, including other on-chain perpetuals products that launched years before Hyperliquid. I believe there is truly something remarkable about Hyperliquid – from its laser focus on building the best platform for trading any asset, to its origin story of being entirely self-funded, with no venture capital funding. This ethos – along with massively rewarding its early users – has earned Hyperliquid a deeply loyal community aligned to the platform's success, while it continues to direct nearly all its revenues toward the repurchase of the HYPE token. At the same time, Hyperliquid has never compromised on technical performance, maintaining 100% uptime even during the biggest crypto liquidation event in history on October 10, 2025. We believe that there is simply no second best; liquidity is the ultimate moat and it is maintained with breakneck technical innovation on Hyperliquid. Our view is that these fundamentals – backed with transparent on-chain metrics – will compound over time and gain further recognition from users and investors, ultimately aligning Hyperliquid with secular megatrends.

The Tokenization Megatrend

The clear megatrend is tokenization and the digital representation of Real World Assets ("RWAs"). This is happening in real time, with major enterprises in both tech and finance adopting blockchain technology to streamline their offerings and enhance their product base. Eventually trillions of dollars will come on-chain, and there are only so many blockchain platforms that will have the infrastructure and scale to meet the needs of institutions. These non-crypto-native entities will demand credible neutrality, an immutable source of truth, smart contract programmability that removes the need for middlemen, and mechanisms that enable streamlined financial activity. Only blockchain can provide this and we believe Hyperliquid is the best positioned for this megatrend. Consider this: the total market cap of crypto is just over $3 trillion today – what happens as the Total Addressable Market of blockchain infrastructure ultimately becomes every RWA and their servicers?

For reference:

Bonds / fixed income (global outstanding): ~$145T
Public equities (global market cap): ~$126T
Money Market Funds: ~$13T

The AI Megatrend

In parallel with the digital representation of financial assets, Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the global economy. AI and agentic ecosystems demand the highest throughput, lowest cost, and most reliable technological infrastructure – again, we believe Hyperliquid is the best positioned blockchain to benefit from the ramping prevalence and dominance of AI in the rapidly evolving financial technology sector.

In October 2025, an organization called Nof1 AI held a live trading competition called Alpha Arena, where multiple frontier models such as GPT5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and DeepSeek Chat V3.1 were each given $10,000 to trade on Hyperliquid. Their goal was to measure the real-time investing intelligence of LLMs when competing in dynamic market environments. Although the experiment was completed in a closed loop, it was a clear signal that non-human participants will eventually be able to participate in financial activity via blockchain rails. As the capabilities of these AI-powered agents continue to improve, we expect decisions to deploy capital will rationalize to the platforms with the most liquidity, competitive pricing and technical efficiency. At the same time, across crypto, numerous teams are building products that enable AI-driven activity to move seamlessly cross-chain, using both on- and off-chain market signals. We believe that agentic participation on Hyperliquid is just beginning, and expect momentum to continue to ramp through 2026, which will positively impact capital efficiency, tighten bid-ask-spreads, and increase trading volume and liquidity, ultimately scaling the platform further.

The Pie Expands

Hyperliquid is not simply another on-chain perpetuals exchange – it allows for on-chain price discovery of tokenized assets at scale, and we believe it will serve as critical infrastructure in this coming technological shift. The perpetual future is a powerful financial instrument that can be used to compound, hedge or otherwise position for any asset, all of which eventually become represented on-chain. Non-crypto users today trade instruments such as options and Contract for Difference ("CFD"), which require brokers to act as counterparties for customized contracts. Perpetuals are exchange-traded – creating a transparent market with a funding rate mechanism to track prices – enabling a structure that can effectively represent any asset if it can be tied to a pricing oracle.

Thus the evolving competitive landscape is not about trying to acquire a larger share of the same pie – instead, we expect the pie to expand significantly over the next decade as users at the retail and institutional level seek out platforms like Hyperliquid in an increasingly financialized world. Winning infrastructure must allow for simple expression of belief, across any asset class, at any time, on a credibly neutral, public platform for financial services.

On Timing and Team

The digital asset space has shown time and time again that those that engage early – with conviction backed by a calculated outlook on the future – are rewarded. Hyperion DeFi is the first-mover building comprehensive exposure to the Hyperliquid blockchain ecosystem, and if done correctly, we expect to serve as the ideal gateway for both retail and institutional investors to access the most valuable components of Hyperliquid. By deploying markets that are globally accessible and trading 24/7, we can generate revenues regardless of the price of HYPE. Secondary to the launch of markets are the various entities that come to Hyperliquid – specifically to trade on those new markets – which we service through HAUS.

All together, we have a business that we believe will grow more powerful with scale – HYPE deployed to the right partners means that more markets can be created, which are the very products that can bring more global users to Hyperliquid.

Supporting us are a select cohort of PIPE investors, known for their long history in crypto, who share my conviction for the need to create a DeFi company focused on Hyperliquid. Our management team and board have also demonstrated their commitment to the business with their combined purchase of 189,204 HYPD shares in the month of December 2025. I personally am fully aligned with you, our shareholder, with ambitious milestones tied directly to the growth and long-term success of Hyperion DeFi.

I could not be more excited to work with the team we've built at Hyperion DeFi. Each collaborator is an expert in their field, and together with the rest of the ecosystem, we aim to continue building innovative products that establish Hyperliquid as the go-to venue for trading any asset, any time.

We are here to complete a singular mission and by doing so, believe we have an asymmetric opportunity to win together. Paradigm shifts are often years in the making, until suddenly, all at once, there is dramatic acceleration. When that time comes, we will be ready.

We hope that you continue along this journey with us – the best is yet to come.

Hyperliquid.

Hyunsu Jung

Chief Executive Officer

Hyperion DeFi, Inc.

About the Hyperliquid Platform and the HYPE Token

Hyperliquid is a next-generation layer one blockchain optimized for high frequency, transparent trading. The blockchain includes fully on-chain perpetual futures and spot order books, with every order, cancel, trade, and liquidation occurring within 70 millisecond block times. It also hosts the HyperEVM, a general-purpose smart contract platform that supports permissionless decentralized financial applications akin to Ethereum.

HYPE is the native token of Hyperliquid. Staked HYPE provides utility for users via reduced trading fees and increased referral bonuses. As of January 2026, more than 37 million HYPE have been autonomously purchased and sequestered by the blockchain with the trading fees generated on the network's central limit order books.

About Hyperion DeFi, Inc.

Hyperion DeFi, Inc. is the first U.S. publicly listed company building a long-term strategic treasury of HYPE. The Company provides investors with streamlined access to the Hyperliquid ecosystem, one of the fastest growing, highest revenue-generating blockchains in the world. Shareholders benefit from compounding exposure to HYPE, both from its native staking yield and additional revenues generated from its unique on-chain utility.

Hyperion DeFi is also developing its proprietary Optejet User Filled Device that is designed to work with a variety of topical ophthalmic liquids, including artificial tears and lens rewetting products. The Optejet is especially useful in chronic front-of-the-eye diseases due to its ease of use, enhanced safety and tolerability, and potential for superior compliance versus standard eye drops. Together, these benefits may result in higher treatment compliance and better outcomes for patients and providers.

For more information, please visit Hyperiondefi.com or follow @hyperiondefi on X.

Forward Looking Statements

Except for historical information, all the statements, expectations and assumptions contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements that express our intentions, beliefs, expectations, strategies, predictions or any other statements, our future activities or other future events or conditions, including the viability of, and risks associated with, our cryptocurrency treasury strategy, the growth and revenue potential of the Hyperliquid ecosystem and the growth prospects of the Company. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about our business based, in part, on assumptions made by management. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may, and in some cases are likely to, differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements due to numerous factors discussed from time to time in documents which we file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Any forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and except as may be required under applicable securities laws, Hyperion DeFi does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Certain information contained in this press release relates to or is based on studies, publications, surveys and other data obtained from third-party sources and Hyperion DeFi's own internal estimates and research. While Hyperion DeFi believes these third-party studies, publications, surveys and other data to be reliable as of the date of this press release, it has not independently verified, and makes no representation as to the adequacy, fairness, accuracy or completeness of any information obtained from third-party sources. In addition, no independent source has evaluated the reasonableness or accuracy of Hyperion DeFi's internal estimates or research, and no reliance should be made on any information or statements made in this press release relating to or based on such internal estimates and research. You should conduct your own investigation and analysis of Hyperion DeFi, its business, prospects, results of operations and financial condition. In furnishing this information, Hyperion DeFi does not undertake any obligation to provide you with access to any additional information (including forward-looking information and any projections contained herein) or to update or correct the information.

Hyperion DeFi, Inc. Investor Contact:

Jason Assad

Hyperion DeFi, Inc.

IR@hyperiondefi.com

(678) 570-6791

Hyperion DeFi Issues Letter to Shareholders