HYPE, BDAG, and TON Are Setting the Pace for Digital Assets in 2025

Wall Street's getting crypto fever again, but this time it's not just about Bitcoin hitting new highs. Three projects are stealing the spotlight in June 2025, and if you're watching from Singapore, Bangkok, or Ho Chi Minh City, you might want to pay attention.

What's Actually Happening Up There

Picture this: while everyone was busy arguing about whether crypto was dead after the 2022 meltdown, three projects quietly built something that actually works. Hyperliquid (HYPE) just became the derivatives trading powerhouse that makes traditional exchanges look like they're running on dial-up. BlockDAG (BDAG) raised $289.5 million in presale by promising to solve blockchain's speed problem. And Toncoin (TON) turned Telegram—yes, the messaging app your cousin uses—into a crypto gateway for over a billion people.

Think of it like this: if crypto's first wave was the Wild West, and the second wave was trying to build banks in that Wild West, this third wave is actually creating functioning cities. The difference? These projects didn't just copy Bitcoin's homework—they rewrote the assignment entirely.

The Deeper Dive: What Makes These Three Special

Hyperliquid isn't just another trading platform pretending to be decentralized while running on Amazon servers. This thing processes 200,000 orders per second entirely on-chain through its upgraded HyperBFT consensus mechanism—a breakthrough that's like watching a Formula 1 race where every lap time gets permanently recorded in an unchangeable ledger. Their secret sauce? A custom blockchain built specifically for trading, not trying to force derivatives onto a network designed for simple transfers.

Here's the kicker: HYPE token has surged 66.2% over the past 30 days, with the platform dominating derivatives trading with an impressive $248 billion in trading volume during May 2025 alone. But unlike the meme coin rallies we're used to, this surge came with actual institutional-grade volume—$549.74 million locked in the protocol and commanding 38% market share of all decentralized derivatives trading. When you're moving that much real money, Wall Street definitely notices.

BlockDAG took a different approach—they asked, "What if we could have Bitcoin's security but Ethereum's speed?" Their answer: combine a blockchain with something called a Directed Acyclic Graph (fancy words for "organize transactions like a family tree instead of a single line"). Result? They're targeting 2,000 transactions per second on their testnet environment, with ambitious plans to scale beyond 15,000 TPS by mainnet launch.

The presale numbers tell the story: $289.5 million raised as of June 9, 2025, across multiple batches, with early investors seeing 2,380% returns as the token price climbed from $0.001 to $0.0248. That's not speculation—that's people betting real money on a technical solution to crypto's biggest problem: actually being usable at scale. But here's the critical caveat: these are testnet performance metrics and pre-mainnet promises. The actual network hasn't processed real-world transaction loads yet, so all those impressive speed claims remain theoretical until proven under live conditions.

Toncoin might be the smartest play of all. Instead of building another blockchain and hoping people would use it, they plugged into Telegram's 1.2 billion users. Suddenly, sending crypto became as easy as sending a message. The numbers back it up: approximately 1.9 million daily transactions as of June 10, 2025, and here's the big catalyst—Tether (USDT) launched natively on TON, making stablecoin transfers as simple as a text. While the total value locked sits at $350 million (significantly smaller than Hyperliquid but growing steadily), the transaction volume tells a compelling story about actual real-world usage.

Comparative Performance at a Glance

Hyperliquid (HYPE)

• Market Cap: $14.1B
• TVL: $549.74M
• Daily Activity: 200k orders/sec
• Key Performance Metric: $248B May trading volume