Data & Insights: Zuper Zycle; Robinhood Chain ATHs

• Data & Insights is a weekly series showcasing top charts from The Block’s Data Dashboard.
• This week, we’re taking a look at ZEC’s recent monstrous returns and Polymarket’s crypto volumes. We’ll also look at how crypto-related stocks are doing, as well as Robinhood Chain and Hyperliquid.

Zcash Zuper Zycle 

• Zcash's monthly performance has dominated the top 20 coins, returning 86% over the last 30 days, compared to Hyperliquid in second with 53%. Benchmarked to Bitcoin, ZEC has outperformed by more than 2.5 times and, crucially, has passed the $1,000 mark on Friday. 
• Zcash was originally a Bitcoin fork with added privacy features leveraging zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. This enabled features like private peer-to-peer sending while maintaining similar tokenomics and mining functionality to Bitcoin. 
  • Zcash has two kinds of addresses. Transparent addresses (t-addrs) behave exactly like Bitcoin and are fully public. Shielded addresses (z-addrs) hide sender, receiver, and amount, with validity proven by zk-SNARKs rather than by revealing the data. The dual pool function makes privacy an opt-in feature.
• Zcash has also made waves on Wall Street. The ZEC-associated DAT Cypherpunk Technologies (CYPH) is up more than 200% in the last 30 days, and Grayscale introduced a spot ZEC ETF, which has gained more than $400 million in AUM. 
  • Both ETF and DAT have signaled ecosystem support for ZCash, with CYPH actively investing in ecosystem projects such as ZODL and Grayscale committing the first year of ETF fees to supporting marketing and the ecosystem. 
• With early momentum being so important at the start of cycles, Zcash sits in pole position to continue its run. Narratively, Zcash has been positioned as an upgrade to Bitcoin, solving an age-old question around privacy. 

Volume Up and Down

• Polymarket Crypto Up and Down volume has dropped to roughly $20 million a day after peaking at over $90 million. These are timed contracts that allow traders to speculate on the future price of Crypto tokens. 
  • Most traders choose to trade the 5-minute market, which has contributed to its 80% volume share dominance. These markets are unique because contracts resolve to binary outcomes tied to time. 
• Instead, perpetuals have picked up volume, letting you speculate on price without a time expiration. Since beta, Polymarket perpetuals have already done $13 billion in cumulative volume. August daily volume hovers around $115 million, more than 5x that of 5-minute price markets. Top markets include ETH, BTC, and HYPE.
• By launching perps, Polymarket is positioning itself to compete with other perpetual apps like Hyperliquid. While prediction markets expand into perpetual trading, perpetual trading platforms are expanding into prediction markets. HIP-4, which is Hyperliquid's prediction market, is live, with momentum slowly picking up. Ultimately, which platform wins will depend on usability, depth of liquidity, and user stickiness.

Miner Underperformance

• Since the start of the bull market, crypto stocks have traded alongside bitcoin, except for Bitcoin miners. BTC price has risen roughly 22% since August 17, and crypto exchanges and stablecoins have traded at parity. 
  • Crypto exchanges include crypto-native venues such as Bullish and Coinbase, as well as superapp Robinhood, which offers a wider range of traditional services like banking and credit cards. 
  • Stablecoins include USDC's parent, Circle, and the tokenized HELOC company Figure. 
• Bitcoin miners have performed exceptionally poorly. Among tracked companies, only one Bitcoin mining company has outperformed Bitcoin: Canaan Inc the Bitcoin mining rig manufacturer. The remaining 10 Bitcoin miners and mining-adjacent companies have underperformed, with a median return of only 1.8% since the bull market. 
  • Several Bitcoin miners pivoted to HPC (high-performance computing), also known as AI data centers. This pivot, while helping support the stock price during the crypto bear market, has split attention. Further operational risks also form a drag on miner price action. 
  • Some of the worst offenders include Core Scientific and Terawulf, which have underperformed Bitcoin by 27% and 24%, respectively. 
• Ultimately, these miners with AI data center businesses can reap benefits from both sides. Mining Bitcoin can be lucrative during bull markets, while data center build-outs for AI can support balance sheets during crypto drawdowns. 

Good Hood Money

• Robinhood chain generated a single-day record of ~$6 million in fees on Friday, September 4th.
  • Fees over the prior seven days totalled ~$25 million, compared to just $1.4 million, representing a 17x increase in just one week
  • Meanwhile, total DEX volume for the week totalled $12.4 billion, more than double the prior week’s total.
  • Interestingly, daily active accounts averaged ~396K across last week, which is lower than the prior week’s average.
  • This implies that Robinhood Chain has been extracting far more from its existing user base than before, as fees generated per active account have gone from ~$0.13 in mid-August to ~$15.9 by early September.
  • This entire phenomenon can be traced back to one protocol, Pons, now the chain’s leading token launchpad
• On September 3rd, Pons managed to generate nearly $6 million in fees, which was more than what pump.fun and Hyperliquid managed in the same day.
  • The PONS token reached an all-time high valuation of over $970 million on September 5th, as the token is up over 200% in the last week alone.
  • PON’s tokenomics are quite reflexive, as roughly 80% of the revenue it generates is used towards token buybacks, with over 28% of the PONS supply burnt so far.
  • It will be interesting to watch how Pons’ token launch count fares in the coming weeks, as fees are merely a lagging function of how many new pools exist to trade against, and whether the flywheel maintains if volume drops off.

10/10 Recovery

• Hyperliquid’s total open interest (OI) reached $14.3 billion on Sunday, September 6th, within 3% of the OI on the day before the infamous 10/10 crash
  • For context, on October 10, 2025, Hyperliquid’s OI fell by ~56% in a single day, from $14.7 billion to just ~$6.5 billion.
  • The recovery since then has been a story of two distinct halves.
  • The first is HIP-3, which carried the first leg as its share of Hyperliquid’s total OI grew from ~18% in March 2026 to over 34% by August.
  • HIP-3 OI itself set a record of over $4.44 billion in August.
• Of the $8.47 billion increase in Hyperliquid’s total OI over the past six months, HIP-3 accounted for roughly 30% of that growth.
  • Over the past three months, HIP-3’s OI growth accounted for 15% of total OI growth.
  • Over the past month, Hyperliquid’s total OI rose by ~$3.57 billion, yet HIP-3 OI fell by $119 million.
  • HIP-3’s share of total OI has also declined from ~34% this time last month to ~25% today.
• Two likely catalysts initiated the growth in Hyperliquid’s crypto perps.
  • The first is that Coinbase began routing Base App users to Hyperliquid in mid-August, opening up a new retail funnel for Hyperliquid.
  • Second is President Trump stating that the CFTC is working on bridging Hyperliquid onshore in a compliant form.
• Interestingly, this composition shift matters a lot more for HYPE than one might assume.
  • HIP-3 builders keep up to half the trading fees on markets they deploy, and the effect of this has been visible in Hyperliquid’s economics.
  • Hyperliquid’s gross revenue peaked at $457 million in Q3 2025, and fell to $202 million by Q2 2026.
  • At the same time, Assistance Fund purchases fell from $290 million in Q3 2025 to $149 million in Q2 2026.
  • All while HIP-3’s share of total OI has increased dramatically.
  • It is worth noting that Hyperliquid’s core crypto perps route close to 97% of the fees it generates into HYPE buybacks.
  • In other words, a dollar of OI returning to Hyperliquid’s crypto perps is worth materially more to HYPE than a dollar arriving through a builder (in this case, HIP-3).
  • HYPE has priced this accordingly, now sitting at an all-time high of $88 at the time of writing, with a market cap of nearly $20 billion, up over 50% this month.