Trasia Targets the Asian Traders Hyperliquid Has Not Reached
Multicoin Capital has made its first direct investment in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, providing a $1.75 million seed round as the sole investor in Trasia Labs, a perpetual futures trading platform built to bring Asian retail and institutional traders onto the fast-growing on-chain derivatives venue.
The deal closed in approximately June 2026, roughly a month after Trasia was co-founded by Mable Jiang and Edison Chen. Jiang joined Multicoin Capital in December 2019 as the firm's first significant Asia hire, then moved to Find Satoshi Lab as Chief Revenue Officer in May 2022, the company behind the move-to-earn app STEPN. She departed FSL on July 17, 2025, and co-founded Trasia roughly one year later. That timeline underscores both how recent this pivot is and why her regional network is central to the platform's value proposition. The platform offers a bilingual interface in Chinese and English, with a mobile app slated for August 2026. The team of ten is spread across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tokyo.
Distribution Over Infrastructure
The modest seed amount is not the story here. Trasia's pitch rests on a problem Hyperliquid has not solved on its own: reaching Asian traders who expect mobile-first design, Chinese-language interfaces, and community access through regional channels. Jiang put it plainly in a statement to The Block: "The real moat is the unique users you can reach and own."
Hyperliquid built one of the most technically capable on-chain derivatives platforms in existence without ever taking venture capital, meaning protocol revenue flows back to token holders through buybacks rather than to investors. By end of 2025 the platform had roughly 923,000 users and processed approximately $2.9 trillion in annual trading volume. Asia-Pacific already accounts for an estimated 45 to 50 percent of global crypto derivatives trading volume, yet Hyperliquid has yet to gain significant traction in retail-heavy Asian markets.
Trasia is positioning itself to fill that gap.
The HIP-3 Play: Asian Equity Perpetuals
Trasia's more technically ambitious move involves Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3, or HIP-3, a framework that launched on mainnet October 13, 2025. HIP-3 allows any builder to deploy their own permissionless perpetual futures markets directly on Hyperliquid's core infrastructure, inheriting the same high-performance order books and margin systems that power the broader platform. The catch is significant: builders must stake 500,000 HYPE tokens as a collateral requirement. At HYPE prices in the $60 to $80 range as of mid-2026, that threshold translated to roughly $30 to $40 million in committed capital, though the figure moves with the token price and should be verified against the current rate.
Trasia has disclosed more than $35 million in HYPE and USDC committed as market liquidity for its HIP-3 Asian equity perpetuals. That figure and the 500,000 HYPE staking collateral required under HIP-3 rules are technically distinct obligations, though the HYPE portion of the liquidity commitment may satisfy the staking requirement in whole or in part. The degree of overlap has not been confirmed.
The product focus is Asian equity perpetuals, linking instruments to indices such as the Nikkei 225, KOSPI, and Hang Seng. These are largely absent from existing on-chain venues. The first HIP-3 deployer, Trade[XYZ], launched US equity perps tied to Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and Amazon, along with a synthetic Nasdaq index contract. Separately, an S&P 500 synthetic contract on the Hyperliquid platform surpassed $100 million in daily volume in its first week of availability, a signal of strong latent demand for on-chain equity exposure.
Trasia is extending that playbook eastward.
A Circular Incentive Worth Noting
Multicoin's investment carries a structural dynamic readers should weigh carefully. The firm has separately disclosed that HYPE is one of its largest liquid token positions, accumulated from February 2026. Multicoin has published price targets for HYPE ranging from $109 in a bear case to $319 in a base case and $689 in a bull case by 2028, derived by applying a 20x earnings multiple to a projected $8 billion in annual protocol earnings.
Approximately 99 percent of Hyperliquid's protocol revenue goes to HYPE buybacks and token burns.
This means Multicoin holds a major stake in the token that underpins the platform, and is now investing in a company whose success would drive more users and volume to that same platform, which in turn would accelerate fees and buybacks benefiting the token. Tushar Jain, Multicoin's Managing Partner, said in a statement: "We expect Trasia to gain meaningful market share quickly and become a dominant force." That outcome would benefit Multicoin twice over.
Competitive Pressure on Hyperliquid
The broader context is not without risk. Hyperliquid's dominance in on-chain perpetuals is real: the platform holds more than 59 percent of on-chain perpetual open interest, with approximately $9.17 billion in open interest and $172.63 billion in 30-day volume as of mid-2026. But as recently as July 10, 2026, Robinhood Chain briefly overtook Hyperliquid in DEX volume, a sign that competition for on-chain derivatives flow is intensifying.
The regional opportunity is also larger than the markets Trasia has initially named. India's National Stock Exchange is the world's largest derivatives exchange by contract volume, and Indian retail traders have a well-established culture of derivatives participation. That market carries specific complications as well: India's crypto tax framework and its transaction deduction at source rules create compliance friction for non-custodial platforms that centralized competitors with local regulatory cover may not face to the same degree. Whether Trasia eventually addresses South Asia is an open question, but the calculus there illustrates the broader challenge: reaching Asian retail is not a single problem but a patchwork of distinct regulatory and cultural environments.
If well-resourced centralized competitors expand into Asia with regulatory cover and familiar interfaces, Trasia's non-custodial model could face additional friction in jurisdictions with strict identity verification requirements.
For now, Trasia's August mobile launch will be the first concrete test of whether the distribution thesis holds. Reaching the traders Hyperliquid has not yet touched is a credible opportunity. Whether a 10-person team, even one with Jiang's regional network, can capture it is a separate question.