The short version
- Kinetiq Elysium went live on Monday, November 9: a Hyperliquid layer 2 with 100ms blocks, a 300 Mgas/s target and HYPE as its only gas token.
- HYPE bridges in 1:1 from HyperEVM and Uniswap v2, v3 and v4 are already live, but withdrawals take about 5.5 days and one sequencer runs the chain for now.
- HYPE trades at $76.39, down 1.4% on the day, so the launch hasn’t moved the price yet.
- Next: the ArbOS upgrade that lets Elysium apps read and trade HyperCore order books, due about four weeks after launch.
“Elysium is now live.” That was the whole post from Kinetiq at 13:05 UTC on Monday, November 9 (8:05 a.m. in New York), and it switches on Kinetiq Elysium, a general-purpose Hyperliquid layer 2. It runs 100ms blocks, aims for 300 Mgas/s of EVM blockspace and charges every fee in HYPE.
Kinetiq is best known for kHYPE, its liquid staking token. Now it runs a chain. So what does Elysium change for Hyperliquid, and for HYPE?
Kinetiq announced the launch on X:
What Is Kinetiq Elysium, and Why Does Hyperliquid Need It?
Elysium is a fast EVM chain that settles to HyperEVM, Hyperliquid’s own smart contract chain, and uses HYPE as gas. It exists because HyperEVM is kept small on purpose.
HyperEVM’s small blocks carry 3M gas a second, and only its 60-second big blocks reach 30M. That keeps it in step with HyperCore, the order book chain where Hyperliquid’s perps trade, but it leaves little room for apps that update many times a second. Elysium’s own docs put its 300 Mgas/s target at “roughly two orders of magnitude more gas per second than HyperEVM.”
Under the hood it is an Arbitrum Orbit chain, run with Conduit, on the same Nitro engine as Robinhood Chain. The flagship tenants are high-frequency traders and market-making AMMs. Kinetiq tuned fees so a market maker can refresh quotes 5 to 10 times a second cheaply, with a minimum base fee of 0.1 gwei.
HYPE moves in and out 1:1 from HyperEVM as native gas. No wrapper. No new token to buy just to send a transaction. In other words, every trade on Elysium needs HYPE in the wallet first.
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What Works on Day One, and What Waits
The chain, the HYPE bridge and the token bridges are live now. Any ERC-20 token can launch on Elysium, get a 1:1 mirror on HyperEVM and later move to a HyperCore spot order book. Anyone can use the routes: the canonical bridge needs no action from the token’s issuer.
The first big DeFi name showed up within hours. Uniswap put all three of its versions on the chain:
Uniswap v2, v3, and v4 are live on Elysium
@Enter_Elysium brings 100ms blocks to the Hyperliquid ecosystem, with HYPE as gas and settlement on HyperEVM
Builders can plug into Uniswap from day one
Trading apps were lined up too: Click, a Hyperliquid trading app, said on Saturday that Elysium trading starts November 9 in its app.
The headline feature still waits. Smart contracts on Elysium will read HyperCore order books and prices for ordinary gas, and send orders to HyperCore in about 100ms, but only after an ArbOS upgrade that the docs place “about four weeks after mainnet.”
There is one catch worth knowing before bridging. At launch Elysium runs a single sequencer and a single Conduit-run data availability server, with a committee still to come. Withdrawals back to HyperEVM use the standard optimistic route, with a challenge period of about 5.5 days. Fast in, slow out.
SIDE TRAIL: Hyperliquid Team Wallets Get $14.3M of HYPE. None Has Hit an Exchange
What Kinetiq Elysium Means for HYPE
One more chain that runs on HYPE could mean more demand for the coin, but the launch didn’t lift the price today. HYPE trades at $76.39 on Hyperliquid at the time of writing, down 1.4% from yesterday, after a low of $72.46 earlier in the day. Open interest on the HYPE perp stands at 22.05 million HYPE, about $1.68 billion.
On mainnet, priority fees go to the network instead of being burned, and Kinetiq has set aside a builders’ share of sequencer revenue for apps on the chain. Gas on Kinetiq Elysium is cheap by design, so the HYPE it uses up will be small at first. The bigger effect is HYPE that sits on the chain as working capital for traders and AMMs.
The level to watch is $74.45, the nearest support below the price. Above, $82.54 is the first resistance on the daily chart.
TRAIL MAP: DeFi Basics: Swaps, Liquidity Pools and Impermanent Loss
The real test comes with the HyperCore upgrade. Four weeks from November 9 lands on December 7.
Satoshi Flipper has more than 20 years of trading experience, starting in stocks before moving into crypto in 2017, and holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. The edge is reading the economic data: rate decisions, inflation, jobs numbers, earnings and the US markets that move Bitcoin.
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