HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Oil prices slid to their lowest levels in more than three months today after a preliminary ceasefire agreement between the US and Iran raised expectations that more crude could return to global markets and key shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz could reopen.

Brent crude fell below $78 a barrel while West Texas Intermediate dropped to $73.31, extending losses as traders priced in lower geopolitical risk premiums tied to Middle East supply disruptions.

The preliminary pact announced by President Donald Trump and Iranian leaders establishes a 60-day ceasefire to end the active hostilities that have choked the Middle East since late February. A formal memorandum of understanding is scheduled to be officially signed in Switzerland this Friday, according to Bloomberg report.

Trump said on Sunday that the Strait of Hormuz would be opened when the agreement is signed in Switzerland on Friday, writing on Truth Social, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

US Energy Department data, meanwhile, showed that America’s strategic oil stockpiles sank last week to their lowest level since 1983, indicating sustained demand to rebuild them even if the Mideast conflict ends.

Stocks that moved lower:

• Devon Energy, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and Phillips 66 fell as oil prices dropped.

Eos Energy Enterprises is surging in early trading after announcing the official start of commercial production at its second automated battery manufacturing line.

In a statement, the company said this milestone positions it to scale production of its proprietary zinc-based long-duration energy storage systems to meet rising commercial demand.

Management touted the enhanced efficiency of this facility, with design upgrades slashing raw material travel by 86% and shortening the physical production line length by 40% compared to Line 1.

“Battery Line 2 demonstrates our ability to continuously improve as we scale,” said John Mahaz, Chief Operating Officer of Eos. “It validates that our manufacturing system can be replicated and scaled with discipline.”

The battery energy storage company confirmed that while subassemblies will continue coming online through the early third quarter, full production capacity is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. The ultimate goal is to hit an aggregate 4 gigawatt-hours of annual manufacturing capacity by the end of 2026. Management also highlighted that Battery Line 1 already surpassed its full-year 2025 output within the first 164 days of 2026.

Today’s announcement builds on recent operational momentum for Eos, which posted better-than-expected Q1 sales and announced a joint venture with Cerberus Capital Management in May. However, shares are still down 37% year to date.

For the full year, Eos still expects to achieve revenues between $300 million and $400 million, in line with its previously provided guidance.

Qualcomm is in talks to acquire AI chip design firm Tenstorrent for $8 billion to $10 billion, according to The Information.

This transaction, if completed, would be another concrete signal of the San Diego-based chip company’s attempt to carve out a niche in the upstream AI space (data centers), rather than focusing on end-user devices.

Qualcomm’s key business of handset chips has fallen on hard times, particularly in China, due to the memory chip shortage.

Less than eight weeks ago, the chip company was the lowlight in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, down about 20% year to date.

Shares proceeded to surge over 60%, buoyed by optimism that the rising AI tide will lift all boats. With the release of Q2 earnings, CEO Cristiano Amon said that initial shipments of AI chips to a “leading hyperscaler” were on track for later this year, and to expect more on the company’s AI growth plans at its investor day on June 24 (next week). Last month, Bloomberg reported that Qualcomm is poised to sell “millions” of AI chips to TikTok parent ByteDance.

Established AI chip giants and hyperscalers alike have reached agreements with or gobbled up burgeoning AI chip companies as the boom rolls on. In December, Nvidia announced a major licensing deal with AI inference specialist Groq, while Meta bought AI chip startup Rivos in September.

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

• Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.

• XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.

• HYPE has bounced up 12%.

• Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

A major theme of this year is that American companies are once again becoming major sellers of stocks.

For years, companies did the exact opposite: buying back trillions of dollars’ worth of shares, a practice that juiced earnings and was seen as a safe option for management teams that had run out of good-enough projects to allocate their capital to. Just look at Google, which is wiping out more than two years’ worth of buybacks with an $85 billion offering, while Meta reportedly mulls an equity raise of its own.

Now, the mantra is that investment opportunities in AI — particularly as suppliers to the arms race — are a source of future returns that are also key to sustaining higher growth. In short, capex is king, and buybacks are admitting that you don’t have enough investment opportunities that allow you to benefit from the AI boom. Raise debt, raise equity, raise anything — just make sure you’re spending, and the market will reward you. A Goldman Sachs basket of companies with elevated capex relative to peers is besting stocks with the strongest buyback yields by some 30% — the most ever.

This is leading to some major divergences in accrual-based profit measures, like net income and free cash flow (which takes capex into account), for companies like Oracle.

Of course, the rest of the AI complex doesn’t care whether the cash spent on the next data center was raised via debt or equity. More funding for the AI build-out is more funding for the AI build-out. Indeed, if we took capex to a bazillion dollars, that spending would still be accretive for aggregate earnings in the first year (assuming all the recipients of the capex binge were public stocks). Yes, eventually the depreciation on those assets starts to be felt and we’d normalize lower, but in the short term, it’s a boon to the stock market’s bottom line.

This is why Oracle’s chart is actually just a more extreme version of the wider market; free cash flow used to be about 90% of aggregate net income, and now it’s hovering around 75%, per estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Fox said it struck a deal to buy Roku in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at about $22 billion.

The deal values Roku at $160 a share, a 34% premium to where the stock had closed before reports surfaced Friday that Roku was exploring a sale, sending shares 20% higher on Friday.

On Monday, the stock edged lower to around $140, as investors digested the risk profile and timeline of the deal. The unseasonably elevated cost of funding equity positions amid elevated issuance and growth of leveraged ETFs may also be dampening the appeal of merger arbitrage strategies.

Fox stock dropped 17%, putting it at down roughly 25% so far this year.

The deal, expected to close in the first half of calendar year 2027, will expand Fox’s digital footprint as traditional cable continues to shrink. The merger would give Fox direct access to more than 100 million streaming households globally. Once the transaction closes, existing Fox shareholders will hold a roughly 73% stake in the combined company, with Roku shareholders owning the remaining 27%.

Fox has spent the past several years building out its streaming strategy through Tubi and, more recently, FOX One, its direct-to-consumer sports and news product. Just last week, Roku added FOX One as a premium subscription inside its Roku Channel, expanding distribution ahead of the FIFA World Cup.

Roku, meanwhile, has been trying to prove it can turn its scale into consistent profits. Roku generated $613 million in ad revenue in its latest quarter, up 27% year over year.

Roku had surged during the pandemic as investors piled into streaming winners and Roku was one of the beneficiaries of the stay-at-home boom. But it has given back much of those gains.

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch called the acquisition “a defining moment” that combines Fox’s strength in live content with Roku’s streaming scale and platform reach. “This combination will transform the scope of our company into high-growth verticals and yield a step change in our overall growth profile,” he said in the announcement.

Roku CEO Anthony Wood said the deal would help accelerate Roku’s long-term growth while maintaining its position as an open platform.

While other tech companies are turning toward equity markets to finance their latest AI investment plans, Nvidia is reportedly about to tap the corporate bond market for the first time since 2021.

Per Bloomberg, the world’s most valuable company plans to raise at least $20 billion by selling bonds with maturities ranging from 2 to 30 years. Initial chatter has the 30-year maturities priced at a spread of roughly 90 basis points to US Treasurys.

When Nvidia last issued 30-year debt in 2021, markets were still reeling from Covid-induced lockdowns and the coupon was about 220 basis points above the rate on US 30-year government debt.

Does Nvidia need the money? Unequivocally, no. But when you can raise money through the mid-2050s at less than a percentage point above US Treasurys, I suppose you don’t say no. It’s better (and cheaper) to raise money when you don’t have to compared to when you’re in dire straits.

And of course, while there’s been some tiptoeing into stock issuance, the credit market has still been the dominant means by which megacap tech companies look to find extra cash to facilitate their AI outlays. Google, in particular, has gone on a United Nations issuance spree this year.

Oil names including Occidental Petroleum, Marathon Petroleum, CF Industries, Devon Energy, Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, and Chevron are all ticking lower on Monday, following oil itself, after the US and Iran agreed to strike a deal to end a conflict that has pushed energy stocks up in recent months.

Alongside the countries both declaring the end of their military operations, US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the Strait of Hormuz would be opened when the agreement is signed in Switzerland on Friday, writing on Truth Social, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Let the oil flow?

Vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, however, remains largely unchanged since the announcement of the peace deal on Sunday, per crossing data tracked by AIS. With the exception of some smaller vessels and prearranged crossings, shipowners are likely waiting for the planned signing on Friday and further confirmation from the Iranian side before attempting transits.

Analysts at the Baltic and International Maritime Council said that they “still consider it very risking for ships to commence transits” through Hormuz, adding that they “expect it will take several weeks for all [trapped] ships to leave” in a conversation with CNN.