Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of CryptoQuant, said this week that HYPE has become the most bullish cryptocurrency in analyst sentiment, pointing to Hyperliquid's fee-driven buybacks as the main reason. The ranking he published puts HYPE ahead of BNB, SOL and BTC, with ADA, XRP, ETH and UNI further down the list. The call lands while HYPE trades just north of $80, roughly 18% below its all-time high of nearly $100 earlier this year.
Why buybacks keep showing up in the bull case
Hyperliquid spends a slice of platform fees to repurchase HYPE from the open market. That turns trading activity into a steady bid for the token, and it's the mechanism Ki keeps coming back to. It's a simple pitch: more volume on the protocol means more tokens bought back, and that demand doesn't depend on a new narrative cycle.
Whether that's enough to justify the top spot in sentiment is another question. Rankings like this measure what analysts are saying, not what the market is doing. HYPE is still well off its high for the year.
The counter-sentiment problem
Ali Martinez looked at the same ranking and read it the other way. "From a counter-sentiment perspective, that's bearish!" he said. Crowded bullish feeling, in his framing, is a warning rather than a confirmation.
He isn't bearish on the chart itself, though. Martinez flagged a fresh TD Sequential buy signal on HYPE and noted that the last one was followed by a rebound of about 11%. If this one gets similar follow-through, he sees a test of $86 and then resistance near $93.
What the chart is holding
Analyst Jelle is watching the 100-day EMA. HYPE has been testing it and has bounced off so far, which keeps the setup intact. Jelle said the long-term picture doesn't change as long as the June highs around $76 hold. That level is the line between a pullback and something more serious.
A whale's exit route
One large holder has already moved. An anonymous whale bought 257,928 HYPE toward the end of 2024 at around $3.50 per token. The same wallet recently sent more than 230,000 HYPE to Kraken. If that transfer turns into a sale, the profit is close to $20 million.
That's the kind of move that makes buybacks look less like a floor and more like liquidity for sellers. It doesn't prove anything on its own. But a whale taking chips off the table while sentiment ranks HYPE first is the sort of mismatch the counter-sentiment argument is built on.
The next test is whether the TD Sequential signal plays out the way the last one did. If it does, $86 and then $93 come into view. If it doesn't, Jelle's $76 line becomes the number to watch.
