Grayscale-linked wallets scooped up 115,733 HYPE tokens, worth approximately $6.65 million, in the span of a single hour on May 21. Over the preceding week, two wallets associated with Grayscale purchased a total of roughly 682,190 HYPE tokens valued at around $34.9 million, according to on-chain data tracked by Lookonchain. A portion of those holdings were staked shortly after acquisition.

What’s behind the buying spree

Grayscale filed an S-1 registration with the SEC on March 20 for a spot HYPE ETF, proposing to list it under the ticker GHYP on Nasdaq. These on-chain purchases look a lot like a fund manager building its underlying position before a product goes live.

In May, Grayscale amended its HYPE ETF filing to designate Anchorage Digital Bank as the primary custodian. Anchorage is a federally chartered digital asset bank.

On April 10, HYPE appeared on Grayscale’s published list of assets under consideration for future investment products. Roughly six weeks later, wallets tied to the firm were accumulating the token at millions of dollars per hour.

What is HYPE, and why does Grayscale care

HYPE is the native token of Hyperliquid, a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for decentralized perpetual futures and spot trading. HYPE serves multiple roles within the Hyperliquid ecosystem: it functions as the gas token for transactions, the staking asset for network security, a governance token for protocol decisions, and an incentive mechanism for trading activity on the platform.

What this means for investors

Removing over 680,000 tokens from circulating supply in a week directly impacts available liquidity. The fact that some of those tokens were immediately staked further reduces the free float.

ETF approval is far from guaranteed. The SEC has a long history of delaying, amending, and occasionally rejecting crypto product filings. An S-1 filing is the starting line, not the finish line. If the ETF gets denied or indefinitely delayed, Grayscale would be sitting on a large position in a relatively young token with a much less certain demand catalyst.

The staking behavior is worth monitoring closely. If Grayscale-linked wallets continue to stake their accumulated HYPE rather than holding it liquid, that suggests a longer time horizon and deeper conviction in the protocol’s fundamentals, and means these tokens are effectively locked up as network validators.