The amended S-1/A filed on 11 April names the ticker BHYP, sets a 0.67% management fee, and lists FalconX, Flowdesk, Nonco and Wintermute as approved trading counterparties. The trust will pursue a secondary objective of staking yield.
Bitwise filed its second amended prospectus for a spot Hyperliquid exchange-traded fund on 11 April, moving the product a step closer to launch with two material updates: the ticker will be BHYP and the management fee will be 0.67 percent. The filing, submitted as an S-1/A to the Securities and Exchange Commission, also named the four market makers approved as trading counterparties — FalconX, Flowdesk, Nonco and Wintermute — and confirmed the trust's benchmark will be the CF Hyperliquid-Dollar US Settlement Price calculated by CF Benchmarks.
The filing matters for two reasons. First, it is the clearest signal to date that a spot ETF for HYPE — the native token of Hyperliquid's layer-1 perpetuals exchange — is weeks rather than months away. Second, it includes a staking provision. The trust's stated secondary objective is to generate additional HYPE through staking, which would make BHYP one of the first US-listed crypto ETFs to distribute staking rewards to shareholders rather than stockpiling them in a separate reserve. The spot Ethereum ETFs that launched in May 2024 did not include staking; it took a rule change and a revised SEC interpretation to get to this point.
At 0.67 percent, the management fee is higher than the spot Bitcoin ETF average — IBIT charges 0.25 percent, FBTC 0.25 percent, and several sponsors waived fees entirely during their first-year launch windows in January 2024 — but lower than the sponsor fees on the first Ethereum products. The premium reflects the operational cost of running a staking-enabled vehicle on a chain that most American custodians have only recently added to their desks. Bitwise has priced the product on the assumption that institutional allocators will accept the markup in exchange for passive exposure to a token that currently pays double-digit yields through its validator economy.
The choice of NYSE Arca as the listing venue is standard. The counterparty list is more interesting. FalconX (now trading under the Solios brand) and Wintermute are the most active market makers in the Hyperliquid cash market. Flowdesk and Nonco are smaller but have been building out onchain trading desks over the past year. Naming four rather than the usual two gives Bitwise redundancy in a market that remains relatively thin — Hyperliquid's spot volume is a fraction of its derivatives volume, and a spot ETF that could not source inventory at scale would price at a persistent premium to NAV. Four counterparties, at a minimum, lets the sponsor avoid that failure mode.
HYPE responded predictably. The token climbed roughly 7 percent in the 24 hours following the filing before cooling. Options open interest on offshore venues has rebuilt since the March drawdown. The broader question traders are asking is not whether Bitwise will get BHYP to market but whether it will remain the only product of its kind when it does — 21Shares has a competing filing in earlier stages, and Franklin Templeton is known to be running internal work on a Hyperliquid vehicle without yet going public.
There is a structural point worth making about Hyperliquid itself. The chain is unusual among smart-contract platforms in that the majority of its economic activity runs on a single application: the native perpetuals exchange that entered the top 10 derivatives venues by volume in Q1. Token holders who stake HYPE earn a share of the exchange's fee revenue, which in 2025 ran to around $900 million on an annualised basis. That is not a speculative cash-flow projection — it is reported, onchain, and distributed to stakers each epoch. A staking-enabled ETF turns that fee stream into a product that an American retirement account can hold, which is the kind of transformation regulators have been reluctant to approve for almost any other proof-of-stake network.
Bitwise declined to comment on launch timing. The usual path from a second amended S-1 to effectiveness is a matter of weeks if the staff has no further comments, and the company has already cleared most of the open items from earlier rounds. An initial listing by end of April is plausible; early May is more likely if the staking language draws additional scrutiny. The SEC under Paul Atkins has been faster on these filings than under Gary Gensler, but faster in this context still means a product that has been in registration since January.
The filing reinforces a pattern. Every new crypto ETF approved in 2026 has extended the category into territory that seemed off-limits a year earlier — first altcoins, then staking, now exchange-native tokens tied to a single operational business. Bitwise has form here, having co-led the first spot Solana ETFs to reach US markets. BHYP is not the last step in that progression, but it is the one that makes the direction of travel difficult to argue with.
