Hyperliquid Longs Paid Up to Hold the Chip Selloff
Hyperliquid traders added to chip-stock perpetuals as US semiconductor shares sank after the midterms, paying elevated hourly funding to keep those positions open while prices kept falling.
Key Takeaways
- Chip-stock contracts held rose 60% over two days.
- The underlying stocks fell between 12% and 28%.
- Funding hit about five times its resting level.
- Megacap tech contracts held dropped 27%.
The AI trade broke, and chip contracts grew
Dune’s November 6 study tracked Hyperliquid’s stock perpetuals through November 4-5, the two sessions after the midterm vote, and found traders building chip exposure while the stocks fell and funding climbed.
The selloff had a political trigger. Democrats’ sweeping midterm wins raised concern on Wall Street that the AI data-center buildout could slow, and chip and data-center stocks slipped on November 4 even as the wider market rallied. On November 5, CNBC reported that the Nasdaq fell 5.5%, its worst day since April 2025. Nvidia and Qualcomm each lost more than 9%, and AMD, Micron and Applied Materials posted double-digit declines. Qualcomm also carried the weight of its own disappointing outlook.
Dune’s figures show where Hyperliquid traders stood during that drop. Across US chip and memory perpetuals, contracts held rose 60% while the underlying stocks lost 12-28%. The measure counts contracts, so falling prices cannot explain the increase: traders opened new positions into the decline.
They did not add AI exposure across the board. Contracts held in megacap technology names fell 27%, even though the large cloud providers’ shares lost only 2-4% on November 5. Vistra, a power producer whose shares trade on expectations of data-center electricity demand, saw its contracts drop 29%. Traders cut positions where prices held up best and built them where the losses were deepest.
Funding shows who was paying
A rising contract count shows more positions, but not which side opened them, because every perpetual has a long and a short. Funding fills that gap. Under Hyperliquid’s funding rules, the rate turns positive when the contract trades above the oracle price taken from the underlying market, and longs then pay shorts every hour.
Funding at about five times its resting level during a 12-28% decline means buyers were bidding the perpetuals above the reference price as the stocks fell. That signals long demand outrunning the shorts willing to meet it, which is dip buying by another name.
The strongest objection is that some of those longs were not rebound bets. A trader short Nvidia shares elsewhere, or short a Nasdaq contract, could hold a chip perpetual as a hedge. Dune’s aggregate figures cannot separate those accounts, and they do not show entry prices, collateral or positions on other venues. The reading holds for the market as a whole, not for every trader in it.
What waiting for a rebound costs
A perpetual tracks a share price with no expiry date and no ownership of the company; Coindoo’s look at stocks and commodities on Hyperliquid covers how the venue supplies that exposure. In place of an expiry, the contract settles funding hourly between traders. Hyperliquid takes no fee on those payments. Each one equals position size times the oracle price times the rate, so the bill scales with the exposure held, not with the margin posted.
Hyperliquid’s default interest component is 0.01% every eight hours, or 0.00125% an hour, about 11.6% a year. Markets launched by outside builders can set their own interest rate and funding multiplier, and most of Hyperliquid’s equity exposure sits in those markets. If a chip market’s resting level matched the default, five times it would be roughly 0.006% an hour, close to 55% annualized.
What that rate costs a 10x long on a $10,000 position
One day
$15
1.5% of margin
One week
$105
10.5% of margin
30 days
$450
45% of margin
Assumes $1,000 of margin, funding held at the rate above, and no trading fees or price change.
None of that cost depends on the stock falling further. A position that goes sideways still pays every hour, and a falling price shrinks the margin that absorbs those payments. For an unhedged long, the rebound had to be large enough to cover the funding bill and arrive soon enough that the account still had the margin to stay open.
Early buyers faced most of the fall
Dune also measured how much of each day’s move the perpetuals had priced by 14:00 UTC. On November 4, they already pointed toward the eventual close for 15 of 16 stocks and had absorbed about two-thirds of the median daily move. On November 5, the day of the steepest losses, they had absorbed only about a fifth of that day’s decline.
That checkpoint sits half an hour before the regular US open, which moved to 14:30 UTC when US clocks changed on November 1. Premarket trading was already running, so the perpetuals were not the only market adjusting, and only a side-by-side comparison with premarket quotes could show whether they led.
For the rebound trade, the November 5 figure carries the weight. Dune’s data does not show when the new contracts were opened. Any opened around that hour, though, still had roughly four-fifths of the day’s drop ahead of them and paid elevated funding throughout. An early price is not the same as a good entry.
Two signals that separate holding from unwinding
Two patterns in the hourly funding and open interest data for the chip and memory markets would show which way the trade is resolving over the coming week.
Longs holding
Funding falls back toward its resting level while contracts held stay near their new high. Longs are keeping their exposure at a lower hourly cost, either because shorts have stepped in or because the premium over the oracle price has faded.
Longs unwinding
Contracts held fall as liquidations rise in the same markets, a sign that margin is running out before any rebound. Liquidation figures are the cleaner check, since new positions can mask forced closures in the aggregate contract count.
Until one of those patterns appears, the 60% increase records a bet that traders placed and paid to keep, not one that has paid them.
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
