Hyperliquid retail wallets lost $280M as fees topped half of losses

The fee share is the real story here: when more than half of aggregate retail losses are consumed by trading fees rather than market moves, the venue's economics look less like a marketplace and more like a toll booth on inexperienced flow. That matters for the six consumer apps driving Hyperliquid's expansion, since their growth model depends on converting newcomers faster than the roughly one-in-seven three-month retention rate suggests they can. The open question is whether fee structures or app-level incentives adjust as the retail cohort matures, or whether the protocol's buyback-and-burn engine keeps leaning on the same marginal traders.