The NFT Market Is Reviving on Hyperliquid, but It's Still a Wild West

The most anticipated Hyperliquid NFT trading market should be Drip.Trade (@drip__trade), which will launch on February 27. Although the product has not yet launched, the platform token $JPEG was issued a few days ago.

Since the middle of last year, NFTs have gradually deviated from the "classical value standards." The elements used to assess the value of traditional PFP NFTs, such as image content, community, and traditional brand-building narratives, have basically become ineffective. This trend peaked at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, with projects like Kaito rising to over 10+ ETH, several Cosmos ecosystem projects on Stargaze skyrocketing, and MegaETH causing significant market controversy.

Many players refer to these "FTs disguised as NFTs" as "equity NFTs." The most direct manifestation of this is that these NFTs mostly come from projects that are about to issue tokens, using NFTs as a starting point to warm up the ecosystem, build communities, or directly sell token quotas.

So when I found that NFTs on Hyperliquid had some market activity and surprisingly had a bit of "classical flavor," I was somewhat surprised…

Wild Growth Without an NFT Trading Market

The most anticipated Hyperliquid NFT trading market should be Drip.Trade ( @drip__trade ), which will launch on February 27. Although the product has not yet launched, the platform token $JPEG was issued a few days ago. At its peak, the market cap was close to $20 million, and it is currently around $7.5 million.

The airdrop is targeted at the two hottest NFT projects on Hyperliquid, Wealthy Hypio Babies and K-16 a.k.a KARU, both of which are currently on the Base network and have not yet bridged to HyperEVM.

So how do projects already on HyperEVM trade? Currently, they are trading on Net Protocol, a tool developed by OpenSea protocol engineer aspyn, which already supports some native Hyperliquid NFT transactions.

This wild growth situation makes me reminisce about the inscription era at the beginning of 2023, when I was doing over-the-counter trading with an Excel order book…

Additionally, minting NFTs on Hyperliquid is also quite cumbersome, similar to the early Ordinals. To describe the entire process briefly, you first need to deposit USDC to the Arbitrum network:

After the deposit is confirmed, you purchase $HYPE in the HYPE/USDC trading pair:

After successfully purchasing, return to the Portfolio page and click on Transfer to EVM in your position to transfer $HYPE to HyperEVM.

Once you have $HYPE on HyperEVM, you can use it to mint new projects.

Which NFT Projects Are in the First Tier?

First, of course, is Wealthy Hypio Babies ( @HypioHL ), with a current floor price of about 0.9 ETH, down from an ATH of over 1 ETH. However, the market is currently declining, so a pullback is understandable.

Looking at the floor price trend, you can see that while Hypio's overall trend is steadily rising, it also experienced about a month of dormancy before starting its second wave of price increases in mid-month, setting new highs.

Hypio's community is indeed the best among current Hyperliquid NFT projects, which is reflected in its price and transaction volume. Additionally, holding Hypio has already yielded several airdrops, including the previously mentioned $JPEG from the upcoming Hyperliquid NFT trading market Drip.Trade, the impactful native meme $BUDDY on Hyperliquid, and $SENT from the AI Agent platform Sentiment on Hyperliquid. Upcoming are $Neko from DeFAI Swarm on Hyperliquid and $SPR from the short-term options platform Supurr (formerly Buffer Finance) on Hyperliquid.

The second project under Hypio is K-16 a.k.a KARU ( @karu__16 ), which has a similar value logic to Hypio.

However, KARU's price trend has not been as smooth as Hypio's. After quickly breaking through 0.1 ETH at the start, it saw a significant drop within a week, then rebounded from the bottom to set new highs, proving its resilience.

The last one is TinyHyperCats ( @tinyhypercats ), the first native NFT project on HyperEVM. Since it is native, it currently needs to trade on the aforementioned Net Protocol, with a current floor price of 17 $HYPE.

What New Projects Are Worth Watching?

Hypers ( @HypersOnHL )

This project was mentioned in an article introducing new NFT projects at the end of last year, and it was already quite popular then. It is finally set to launch. Minting will begin on Drip.Trade on February 27. The total supply is 8888, with a minting price of 2 - 2.5 $HYPE.

PiP ( @PiPonHL )

Although it doesn't have many followers, the actual response has been greater than its follower count. There is currently