Tag: DeFi

The UK FCA has warned that Hyperliquid may be providing or promoting financial services without permission. FinTelegram analyses why Hyperliquid’s DeFi positioning may no longer protect it from derivatives regulation, especially after its S&P 500 perpetual exposure.

Hyperliquid has become one of the most extraordinary revenue engines in crypto. Public analytics suggest that the protocol generated roughly $961.5 million in gross protocol revenue in 2025 and about $873.7 million in gross profit, while current annualized revenue still sits near $675 million. At the same time, the network is processing roughly $193.9 billion in 30-day perpetual volume, carrying around $8.2 billion in open interest, and supporting a token market cap of about $10.6 billion. But behind the growth story sits a harder compliance question.

With its April 13, 2026 staff statement, the U.S. SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets has drawn a functional boundary for crypto apps that facilitate transactions in crypto asset securities through self-custodial wallets. The message is clear: a neutral interface may avoid broker-dealer registration, but anything that looks, behaves, or monetizes like an intermediary may still fall into the broker perimeter. For crypto front ends, wallet-linked trading apps, and DeFi-style interfaces, this is not deregulation. It is a conditional warning label.

AXIOM presents itself as a decentralised trading platform, but its own materials describe a branded, fee-based crypto service stack with wallet functionality, no-KYC onboarding, yield features, and leveraged perpetuals trading. For EU compliance analysts, that raises a central MiCA question: is this really “DeFi,” or a brokerage-like access layer inside the regulatory perimeter?

In the public record, 2025 looks like a collapse in US whistleblower award messaging: the US SEC’s own newsroom tag shows 7 award-related items in 2023, 5 in 2024, and just 1 in 2025; the CFTC’s whistleblower news feed shows only one 2025 award post. In an era of open banking + crypto rails, that’s a regulatory red flag.