Hyperliquid Strategies Inc

Good morning, and welcome to Hyperliquid Strategy's second fiscal quarter earnings conference call. My name is Robert Diamond, and I am Director of Corporate Affairs for Hyperliquid Strategies. Participating in today's call are David Shamus, Chief Executive Officer, and Brett Beldner, Chief Financial Officer. David will review the company's vision and strategy, as well as the current business environment and market positioning. This will be followed by Brett, who will review the company's financial performance. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you'll be given instructions for the question and answer session. Before we begin, please note that the comments during today's call and the accompanying presentation contain forward-looking information. All statements other than statements of historical facts are considered forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. Some of these risks and uncertainties are identified and discussed in the company's filings with the SEC. In addition, information in this call and the presentation regarding Hyperliquid and its operations is based on information that has been publicly disseminated by Hyperliquid and has not been independently verified by the company. We ask that you take a moment to read the disclaimers at the beginning of the slides that accompany this presentation as they contain important information.

Thank you, Rob. This is David Shamus. I'm going to start on page five. Just to remind everybody, we are a digital asset treasury company and our job is to hold the hype token. When we closed on December 2nd, investors contributed both hype tokens to us and cash. Since then, we have used our cash to both buy back our stock as well as to buy hype tokens in the market. We continue to be very impressed with the speed at which Hyperliquid is moving to continue to grow its existing crypto business and maybe even more exciting to bring real world assets on chain. Two Fridays ago, when silver had a massive trading day, 2% of the world's trading volume happened on Hyperliquid. And that was after it only being available on the Hyperliquid platform for about three weeks. Incredibly impressive. If you go to page six, just to remind everybody, HSI Hyperliquid Strategies, Inc. is currently the largest debt for hype by a pretty wide margin. I have said before many times that unlike Bitcoin and other widely available tokens, hype is still not easily accessed, particularly in the United States. And our main job, at least for now, is to enable that access for investors on a major U.S. exchange. As we will continue to discuss, we try to be as efficient as possible with our capital, primarily focused on the NAV per share accretion that we can achieve with our activities. We will continue to explore opportunities to enhance our yield while taking as little additional risk as possible. Hype is already a very volatile asset, and we are not looking to turn HSI into a VC fund. On page seven, people have seen this group before, but we're very proud of the world-class group we have put together to help advance the hyperliquid ecosystem and to grow our NAV per share. The most valuable thing that we think we can do for the ecosystem is to help different players and people in the system access the traditional financial system. There aren't too many senior leaders in the traditional financial world that someone in our group can't get access to. Bob was the CEO of Barclays. I frequently point out that Barclays was the only major US or UK bank to never take government money. Eric Rosengren was a career Fed guy who most recently served as the president of the Boston Fed and member of the Fed's Open Market Committee. Larry Leibowitz was the president and COO of the New York Stock Exchange when it was merged into ICE. Tom King was the former head of the Corporate Investment Bank in Barclays, and more importantly, a managing director at Salomon Brothers in the 90s, when both myself and Jeroen, our COO, were lonely analysts in the investment bank. And lastly, we have partnered with some of the top participants in the crypto market who give us TradFi guys some invaluable insights into the crypto world. And most notably, Paradigm is a co-sponsor of the deal with us here. If you go to page eight, we are... executing aggressively on our strategy here. A few things to point out. Two analysts have started to cover HSI. Hopefully they're on this call. And we expect more to come in the not so distant future. We think that it's part of spreading the awareness of hyperliquid. This is done both with things like being on TV and being very public, but it's also one-on-ones with investors going on podcasts, being at conferences, etc. I happen to be sitting in Hong Kong right now at a crypto conference. One of the more interesting things that have happened since we announced this deal last July, needless to say, we have talked to lots of people who find what we're doing interesting. We spent some time with a very large, very well-known high-frequency trading firm. And US based. And amazingly, they told us that they are not able to buy the hype token directly themselves, even though they are quite engaged in crypto trading. And that's because it is traded on a DEX and their current compliance program wouldn't let them invest directly on a DEX. That to me proved just how much value we could be bringing right now by creating a DAT for Hyperliquid. If you go to page 10, This is a bit of a high level on the global financial system. Needless to say, I could drone on here for a long time, but I'm not going to. The basic concept is we have all heard more and more that crypto, excuse me, that real world assets are going to be moving on chain. But how exactly it's going to happen has been an open question a lot of places. And we think hyperliquid is a big part of that. The other thing I want to point out, over the last 10 years or so, there have been crypto maximalists who think the whole world is going on chain and we're all going to be buying bread in the store with Bitcoin overnight. There have also been quite a bit of people from the financial services world in particular who think it's all going to zero and this is all just a joke. For years, we have been sitting somewhere in the middle of those things. And we think the world is moving to being in the middle of those things. I think it is obvious that crypto is real, trillions of dollars of market cap, and will be here for a long time, if not forever. And innovations that come out of it will be very, very important. On the other hand, I don't think we're all going to be buying bread tomorrow with Bitcoin, at least not in the United States. If you go to page 11, On page 11, there are a couple of general observations I'd like to make. First, it is difficult to get consistent data, and when it comes to crypto, there is often no single source of truth. There's also a lack of standardized definitions that we have to cull through to figure out how we think about a lot of these things. There's a lot to cover, and new developments literally pop up every day in this world. 2025 saw solid performance of Hyperliquid as both a perpdex as well as a blockchain. The Perpdex excelled in the first half and was for a long time on track to be the single largest fee-generating blockchain. The blockchain setup proved efficient and saw huge volumes processed and attracted many new users rapidly. Some important innovations turned into real revenue generators very quickly. If we go to page 12... Some numbers around this, from a very small base in the fourth quarter of 2024, hyperliquid saw massive revenue growth through 2025. And even though the fourth quarter was less than the third quarter, so far in the first quarter of 2026, we're seeing a very strong rebound. January had 79 million of revenue, which was approximately double of December. And on that rate, we'd be at about 240 million of revenue for the first quarter. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid is the number one DEX in PERP volume, the number one PERP open interest with more than 150,000 active weekly addresses. If you go to page 13, This is a very important page, and it shows a number of things that are happening in the Hyperliquid system. Over the last 12 months, they've rolled out all these things. I'm going to briefly run through them. First one, builder codes. This is allowing other people, like Phantom, to use their distribution to tap into the perplexity on Hyperliquid, thus adding more volume and more fees to the platform. The second one, HIP3. This allows others to create their own perp exchange front ends for whatever real world assets they see opportunities in without the time and the cost of building the back end nuts and bolts of a central limit order book. The third is BLP. This allows users to share collateral across positions, which is so important to market makers in the platform, ultimately bringing more liquidity to the platform. And fourth, HIP4. Extending the idea of HIP3 in allowing others to create their own front ends in both options and prediction markets. I think for so many companies, we're all used to in the TradFi world, if they achieved one of these things in a 12-month period, they would be very proud of themselves. Hyperliquid is going to do all four of these things. That is extremely, extremely impressive. One thing I always talk about as a way to visualize how important these things are, I'll talk about HIP4 for a second. And imagine being a startup company looking to raise money to compete with PolyMarket. You're sitting in the room with a venture capitalist, and they ask you how long it'll take and how much money it will cost for you to build a back-end processing system to compete with Polymarket. The answer before HIP4 would have been it'll take a lot of money and a lot of time. That would be a serious deterrent to someone putting money into that new venture capital startup. Instead, now, that company can say, we're going to use the infrastructure provided by HIP4, and we're going to entirely focus on the front end, meaning the marketing, the finding customers, and offering interesting things and creating liquidity. The entire back end can be handled by HIP4, which is extremely impressive. On to page 14. These are a couple nice headlines. There's been many, many more, obviously. I will say last spring, when we started seriously investigating hyperliquid, very few people in the traditional finance industry had any idea what hyperliquid was. Today, even with all the progress that it has made, it is still relatively unknown in the circles that we normally run in. A big part of our job is to continue to bring awareness to this amazing blockchain and the technology associated with it to the mainstream financial world. The more people we talk to, the more time we spend on it, the more impressed people are and the more amazed that this has been created and growing right under their nose. Lastly, let's go to page 15. This graph shows perfectly how while so many people are talking about all the useful things that are being built on chain, the hype token has true utility in that 99% of the revenues of the blockchain are being used to repurchase and burn the tokens. Versus everything else in the crypto world today, there is literally no comparison between all of them combined and what Hyperliquid has done in this regard. That being said, let's switch now. Let's go to page 17. This is a little bit how we think about our treasury strategy. This is meant to be a framework. This is an art, not a science. The main point here, the main value we can add is that over time, we want to be able to buy the hype tokens and possibly buy our own shares to take advantage of varying market conditions to ultimately create NAV per share accretion for our shareholders. That is our number one goal. To state the obvious, this chart I think speaks for itself, but when our MNAV is high, we will be selling shares into the market, thus accreting our NAV per share. When our MNAV is low, we'll be buying back our shares from the market, thus accreting our NAV per share. When we believe that hype is trading below its fundamental value, we will be buying the hype tokens. And when we believe that hype is trading above its fundamental value, we will consider selling. Just for the avoidance of doubt, right now, where we have been and pretty much where we have been since close, we believe that hype is well below its real fundamental intrinsic value. And we are, needless to say, very bullish. A simple thing I would tell you is when we think of things like PE, price to earnings, hype trades well below the S&P 500 and even more further below other comparables in the crypto world. It's not even close, actually. You go to page 18. This is a bit of an update of what we have done so far. These numbers are as of last week. We will be going forward, posting on a dashboard all the things we do with a one week lag. So it's perfectly appropriate today that we're showing these numbers with about a one week lag. But since we closed, we have deployed about 150 million, excuse me, 140 million dollars. Of that 140 million, 10 million approximately have been in buying back our own shares. We did that at an average price of $3.42. We've repurchased over 3 million shares. That brings our adjusted fully diluted share count down to about 150 million. We have bought about 130 million in tokens. Our average price is a little under $26 per token. We have purchased about 5 million tokens. And that brings our amount of hype held to about 17 and a half million hype tokens. We have about $125 million of capital remaining. That is both for a treasury deployment, also buying back stock if the opportunity came about. That excludes some capital we're reserving for operating the business. Obviously, we're a public company, and there are costs associated with that. We also have an ELOC in place to do additional share issuances, as we talked about earlier, when we see the opportunity. With that, I'm going to move to page 20, and I'm going to pass on to Brett to talk in more detail about some of the financial metrics.

Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. Now I'd like to discuss our financial performance for the first six months of our fiscal 2026 reporting year. Page 20 provides a summary of our performance. As you will see, HSI's results are driven by two key factors, the change in the value of the hype token between signing and the end of the reporting period and the acquisition of Sonnet. Going back, the terms of the overall transaction provided that we received commitments from investors in both cash and hype tokens of approximately $888 million. The value of the hype contributions was fixed at signing at around $46.37 a token. Upon closing the acquisition of Sonnet in December, the price of the tokens had declined to around $32.86 a token. The difference between the two resulted in an accounting loss on the hype commitment of around $169 million. The acquisition of Sonnet was treated for accounting purposes as an asset acquisition. The excess purchase price paid for Sonnet, including associated transaction costs, over the fair value of both the tangible and intangible net assets acquired represented in-process research and development costs of $35.6 million. These costs were written off at closing as they were not deemed to have any future use. The remainder of our pre-tax operating performance primarily related to the period after the transaction closed through December 31st. We recognized interest income from our cash and cash equivalents and staking income from our hype tokens for a total of approximately $1.4 million. We record our hype tokens at fair value, so any changes in the value of our hype holdings are reflected through income. Due to the decline in the hype token price post-closing, an unrealized loss of approximately $93 million was generated for the time between the transaction closing and December 31st. SG&A and R&D expenses represent operating costs for the period, which include establishing the $1 billion equity line, getting the company up and running, as well as normal operating costs of both the Hype treasury business as well as the Sonnet legacy business. We also note that there was a tax impact of the transaction in our results. The transaction was structured in a manner that allowed the company to receive contributed Hype tokens at an investor's tax basis. The difference between our tax basis and the fair value of the tokens on December 31st resulted in an $18 million deferred tax liability with a corresponding deferred tax expense reflected in our income statement. The net result is a $318 million loss for the six months ending December 31st, 2025. Moving on to page 21 and our balance sheet, I'll spend a minute or two focusing on the material items. There are two material assets on our balance sheet at the end of the quarter, cash and cash equivalents and our hype tokens. Upon closing, we received about $300 million of cash from investors and approximately $10 million from Sonnet. This cash has been used during the period to purchase $9 million of hype tokens, buy back approximately $10 million of common stock, pay closing costs, and pay operating expenses. As of December 31st, we had approximately $282 million of cash and cash equivalents remaining a portion of which, as David discussed, we will maintain to ensure we have sufficient funds for our operations over the foreseeable future and the remainder is eligible to be used for our treasury strategy. The 327 million hype digital assets balance represents the fair value of the approximately 12.9 million hype tokens that we owned as of December 31st. This consists of the hype tokens that we received as contributions from our investors, hype rewards earned from staking, and any hype purchased as part of our treasury strategy. On the liability side, we have no debt obligations other than short-term liabilities that resulted from either the transaction or in the normal course of business. The deferred tax liability represents our current estimate of the tax obligation that would exist if we were to sell all of our hype assets based on the price of the hype token on December 31st. Please note, we currently have no intent to sell our hype, but are required to recognize this under GAAP. Our stockholders' equity represents the value of all the shares and warrants issued in the transaction, less the operating losses from our financial performance and deducting share repurchases. So overall, while the price performance of the HYPE token was not as we would have liked during the reporting period, the size of our cash balance on hand combined with the price of hype in January, left us in a very strong position to execute our treasury strategy. Moving on from our financial results to page 22, We spent a lot of time since closing speaking to investors, analysts, and looking at other digital asset treasury companies. And the one key message that we received is that other than for SEC reporting, there is a lack of transparency in the market about companies' digital asset holdings, cash positions, net asset values, et cetera. We debated internally amongst the senior management team, as well as the board, as to how best provide useful information to the public, but yet not prejudice our ability to be in the market for both hype and our shares. And the result of those discussions is illustrated on page 21. This slide represents a dashboard that we will be putting up on our website that contains an illustration of several key factors that we, as senior management, used to implement our treasury strategy and therefore wanted to share that with the public. Walking through an example, we consider the following. The fair value of our high portfolio the current market capitalization of per or company stock, including any common stock equivalents. Common stock equivalents currently include the number of shares that our preferred stock is convertible into and will include any dilutive securities that may exist in the future. These items are then incorporated into the analysis, which we will show in two ways. On the left side, we take our stockholders' equity or net asset value from the last reporting period and roll it forward through the following. We subtract cash spent from operations, add the amount of cash we've received from issuing equity, and subtract the amount of cash that we've deployed in our treasury strategy. We then remove the balances of our hype portfolio and current deferred tax liability estimate from the last reporting period and update them based on the current hype token price to get an adjusted net asset value number. On the right side, we provide our current cash balance and our hype portfolio at fair value based on the current token price and subtract out our estimated deferred tax liability and adjust for other movements to get to the same adjusted net asset value. The adjusted net asset value is then compared to the current share price to get a trading multiple of adjusted NAF as illustrated on the slide here and will be included on the website Some of these factors, such as the high price and our stock price, will update real time, and other updates, such as the execution of our treasury strategy, will be updated on a weekly basis, one week in arrears. We believe that this information is important for people to understand our business and our performance more often than once a quarter when we provide our required SEC reporting. We hope you will as well. We expect the website will be up and running with this dashboard today. And now I'll turn it back over to David to wrap up the presentation.