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…