Before Hyperliquid was open to everyone, getting in required a referral code. For anyone without one, there was a public fallback: ALPHA. Three years later, the on-chain numbers behind that code are striking. It brought in 2,749 traders who generated $47.6B of volume and later received 28.6M HYPE in the genesis airdrop, worth $2.3B today. Meanwhile, the $923,299 in referral rewards the code earned has never been claimed.

🔑 1. The Code That Opened the Closed Alpha

In 2023, Hyperliquid ran as a closed mainnet alpha: the app was live, but access went through referral codes shared on Discord and X. Guides from that period, like blocmates' Hyperliquid guide, told new users they could simply "use the code ALPHA" to get in.

The code belongs to the address 0x5e9e…a13a. Its referral data is public on Hyperliquid's API, and it tells the story of the closed alpha almost month by month.

ALPHA referral code sign-ups per month

📈 2. 2,749 Traders, Almost All From 2023

The first trader joined through ALPHA on May 25, 2023. Sign-ups then exploded: 1,185 in August and 850 in September 2023. After October 2023, the code went quiet. Only 30 accounts have used it since January 2024.

  • 2,749 referred accounts, 2,719 of them from 2023
  • $47.6B of cumulative volume and $11.95M of trading fees
  • 66 referred traders above $100M of volume, 10 above $1B
  • The largest one traded $3.83B and paid $811K in fees
  • Median volume per account: $37K; 242 accounts never traded
💡 Key fact: the 2,749 traders who came in through ALPHA paid $11.95M in fees. About 7.7% of that, $923,299 in USDC, was credited to the code owner.

💰 3. $923K Sitting Unclaimed

Hyperliquid credits referral rewards automatically, but the referrer has to claim them to move them into their spot balance. For ALPHA, the claimed total is still $0. The address holds:

  • $923,299 in unclaimed USDC rewards
  • About $2,400 more in USDE, USDH and USDT0 rewards from newer quote assets

The rewards are not evenly spread: the top 10 referred traders alone generated 23% of the total.

🪂 4. 28.6M HYPE Airdropped to ALPHA Wallets

On November 29, 2024, Hyperliquid's genesis event airdropped 310M HYPE, 31% of the supply, to early users. We checked the genesis allocation of every account referred by ALPHA.

  • 1,490 ALPHA wallets received HYPE at genesis
  • Together they got 28,563,237 HYPE, about 9.2% of the entire airdrop
  • That was worth $111M at the $3.90 launch price, and $2.31B at today's $80.93
  • 67 wallets received more than 100,000 HYPE, and 296 more than 10,000
Biggest HYPE airdrops among ALPHA referrals

The biggest one went to 0x598f…af8e, also the largest trader in the ALPHA list: 1,455,033 HYPE, worth about $118M today, after $3.83B of volume. The top 10 alone received 7.6M HYPE, 27% of everything that went to ALPHA wallets.

Volume was not the only path. 0x5cc7…aa34 traded just $598K but received 691,292 HYPE. Its activity was almost entirely HLP: it deposited $500,000 on October 31, 2023, added $315,000 in January 2024 and withdrew about $1.03M in February 2024.

The other 1,259 referred accounts got nothing. Most were tiny, with a median volume of $2,000, and 24 only signed up after genesis. But some had traded hundreds of millions during the closed alpha, a period that did earn points. The most likely explanation: receiving HYPE required accepting the Genesis Event Terms on the Hyper Foundation site before November 28, 2024 at 23:59 UTC, and allocations that were never confirmed went back to the reserve. Early traders who had gone quiet since 2023 could easily have missed it.

💡 Key fact: one public code, typed by early users to get past the closed alpha, ended up covering wallets that received nearly one HYPE in ten of the genesis airdrop.

🔍 5. A Hyperliquid Team Wallet

ALPHA is not an influencer code. The on-chain trail points to one answer: the code belongs to the Hyperliquid team itself.

  • First deposit of $900 on February 26, 2023, three months before the first trader joined through ALPHA
  • $3.14B of its own trading volume, all before its last trade on May 10, 2023
  • Repeated transfers with a wallet that owns a referral code named MMTESTREFER and has $3.07B of volume
  • $21,338 sent in May 2023 to the address that leads HLP, Hyperliquid's protocol vault
  • No HYPE at genesis, neither for the ALPHA wallet nor for the MMTESTREFER wallet, despite more than $3B of volume each. Under the points rules, referrers earned 1 point for every 4 points their referred users earned, so the owner of ALPHA should have been in line for a very large allocation

On the same day as its last trade, the account deposited $6,000 into HLP. That position is worth $25,331 today, and the wallet has not touched it since. A wallet trading billions before the public arrived, funded by a market-making test account, sending money to the address that runs HLP and left out of the airdrop: this is the team's own wallet, used to run the closed alpha and hand out its public access code.

⚙️ 6. Can You Still Use ALPHA?

Yes: the code is still active, and two accounts used it in 2026. But it brings no special perk. Under the current referral rules, every code works the same way:

  • The referred user gets a 4% fee discount on their first $25M of volume
  • The referrer earns 10% of the referred user's fees, minus that discount, on their first $1B of volume

Since every code gives the same discount, the only real difference is who you support. If you are opening a Hyperliquid account, you can sign up with our code HLNEWS: you get the 4% fee discount, and it helps keep HyperliquidNews independent.

🎁 Our referral code: app.hyperliquid.xyz/join/HLNEWS, or enter HLNEWS at app.hyperliquid.xyz/referrals.
⚡ What's next: ALPHA is a time capsule of Hyperliquid's closed alpha: a public password that onboarded thousands of the protocol's earliest traders, many of whom later received some of the largest HYPE allocations. Whether the team ever claims the $923K is now one of the more curious open questions on-chain.