Call-buying bonanza around Trump’s Hyperliquid comments includes

Wednesday was already shaping up to be the best for crypto assets in recent memory, with bitcoin trading the highest since June as President Donald Trump scheduled a meeting with industry leaders.

Then the big news hit.

Around 3 p.m. ET, the president hinted at regulating Hyperliquid, the decentralized exchange that’s been garnering popularity among traders as the home base of “perpetual futures” trading — the swap-like derivatives contracts with high leverage and no expiration that have been a thorn in the side of incumbent exchanges this year — despite U.S. residents not being allowed on the platform.

“I understand that [Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair] Mike [Selig] is also working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion,” Trump said in a press conference.

Shares of Hyperliquid Strategies, the publicly traded treasury company that owns Hype tokens, surged 30% before the closing bell, bringing the stock’s year-to-date gain to more than 163%. Hype, the digital token that powers the exchange’s blockchain-based settlement and operations, jumped 18% to just below record highs. Shares of Cboe Global Markets dropped 3.5%, Miami International Holdings‘ shares fell 3.1% and CME Group‘s shares slid 1.7%.

“We’ve been trying for awhile to figure out how to get into the U.S. and the CFTC has been quite responsive, but when Trump says it at a press conference, it means it’s a priority,” David Schamis, CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies and founding partner at Atlas Merchant Capital, said in a call after the bell on Wednesday.

“You can’t do something like this and make new rules — you see how hard it is to get Clarity [Act] passed. You have to figure out how to make it work with rules existing today,” he said. The Clarity Act is a bill that would establish a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies.

Options volume in Hyperliquid was almost eight times the 30-day average, with more than 120,000 calls traded versus under 8,000 puts. Traders bought almost 45,000 calls and sold 29,000. About $10 million in premium exchanged hands, with the biggest single trades coming about a half-hour after the announcement when someone bought 2,000 8-strike calls expiring in November and December for about $510,000.

There was also a flurry of heavy call-trading activity in the hours before the announcement. Just shy of $2 million in calls of various strikes and expiries traded before 3 p.m., including some trades that carried signs of indiscriminate and rushed buying indicative of someone eager to get in on a trade.

In one case, around 11 a.m., someone spent $65,000 trading 719 of the 8-strike calls expiring in mid-October, paying 90 cents each for a contract that had just 67 open positions coming into Wednesday. Those calls are now worth $2.45 each, meaning the trader was up about $111,000 by the…