Kinetiq Protocol: From LST Infrastructure to HIP-3 Deployer
Introduction
Kinetiq is a non-custodial liquid staking protocol built natively on Hyperliquid. Users deposit HYPE and receive kHYPE, a receipt token that accrues staking rewards while remaining usable as collateral across HyperEVM DeFi protocols.
The protocol exists to solve a composability problem specific to Hyperliquid's architecture. Hyperliquid runs two execution environments: Hypercore (the L1 handling the native order book and staking) and HyperEVM (an EVM-compatible layer where third-party DeFi apps deploy). Before the CoreWriter upgrade enabled write access from HyperEVM into Hypercore, integrating staking into DeFi workflows required clunky intermediaries rather than direct onchain calls. Retail users also faced validator selection and monitoring overhead. Kinetiq abstracts these frictions through StakeHub, an automated validator scoring and delegation layer, and expresses the staked position as kHYPE — a wrapper that carries staking yield into collateral, liquidity, and strategy use cases without forfeiting rewards.
Kinetiq launched on mainnet on July 15, 2025, coinciding with the CoreWriter upgrade. As of Jan 8, 2026, Kinetiq holds $679M in total TVL across all modules, representing roughly 49% of Hyperliquid L1 DeFi TVL. Of Hyperliquid's liquid staking market, kHYPE alone accounts for $610M, or 82.5%.
