Traders are piling into Pendle markets that leverage Hyperliquid’s leading liquid staking protocol, betting on a future airdrop.
Yield tokenization platform Pendle and Hyperliquid’s leading liquid staking protocol, Kinetiq, continue to benefit from each other as Pendle’s kHYPE markets cross the $1 billion milestone.
Kinetiq staked HYPE, or kHYPE, is the third largest market on Pendle, trailing Ethena’s USDe and sUSDe, with $1.13 billion in total value locked. Nearly 80% of that is concentrated in kHYPE, while the remaining 20% is in Veda kHYPE (vkHYPE) markets.
PENDLE and HYPE have been two of DeFi’s top-performing tokens in 2025, with HYPE up 480% from its April low, and PENDLE up 170% from its local bottom in March.
The kHYPE market’s success is likely driven by the boost in Kinetiq points that kHYPE YT holders receive as they speculate on the future Kinetiq airdrop.
While there are no details on when the Kinetiq token is expected to launch, the platform’s debut turned heads even before its official opening date, as tens of millions worth of HYPE were unstaked ahead of Kinetiq’s launch, so that users could route their stake through the liquid staking platform instead.
Kinetiq uses an autonomous scoring system which ranks and distributes users’ HYPE tokens amongst the network’s validators.
