Gold Got Expensive, the Rupee Got Weaker, and $NIFTY Just Went On-Chain
India's forex reserves are under pressure and the currency hit a record low. Here is what that means for you, and what went live on Hyperliquid.
On Sunday evening, India’s Prime Minister stood at a rally in Hyderabad and asked 1.4 billion citizens to stop buying gold for a year.
By the time markets opened on Monday, four trillion rupees had been erased in a single session.
Prime ministers do not make that kind of appeal unless the situation has already become serious.
Why the government is panicking about gold?
India imports 85% of its crude oil and nearly all of its gold, both priced and settled in US dollars.
Every wedding purchase, every investment bar, every sovereign gold bond redeemed drains dollar reserves through commercial channels.
The full picture of what New Delhi is managing right now:
Gold import bill: $71.98 billion in 2025-26, up 24% year-on-year
India raises gold and silver tariffs to 15% to curb imports
Forex reserves: peaked at $728.49 billion in late February 2026, fell to $688.05 billion by end of March
Rupee: hit a record low against the dollar this week
FII outflows: foreign investors pulled over Rs 2 lakh crore from Indian equities in 2026 alone
In short, capital is leaving, the currency is weakening, and the import bill is rising.
The government told you to stop buying gold. The RBI is buying gold.
The same government asking citizens to stop buying gold has been accumulating it at the sovereign level.
RBI holdings grew from 794.64 metric tonnes in September 2025 to 880.52 metric tonnes by March 2026, with gold’s share of India’s total forex reserves jumping from 13.92% to 16.7% in the same period.
The RBI has also been physically repatriating gold from the Bank of England back to domestic vaults, with 680.05 of those 880 tonnes now sitting inside India (RBI half-yearly report, March 2026).
If you look closely, central banks accumulate gold when they expect fiat to weaken. RBI is doing the opposite of what the govt. is asking you to do.
The free fall of Rupee in a decade.
USD/INR as of May 13, 2026 is standing at ₹95.75. Over 1 year the rupee has lost 12.87% against the dollar, over 5 years 30.24%, and over 10 years 43.4%.
Unfortunately, this is not slowing down.
Each five-year window has added roughly 12-15% of depreciation, and the current one-year move is already tracking ahead of that average.
Traditionally, gold was the hedge against this. New Delhi just asked you not to buy it and then raised the tariff to make it more expensive anyway. So, what do you hold instead?
India’s benchmark index, now on-chain.
Trade.xyz won the Dutch auction for the $NIFTY ticker on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, with the auction closing at the bid of 500 HYPE
Trade.xyz accounts for ~90% (or $2.14 billion) of all HIP-3 open interest, which has crossed $2.45 billion.
The Nifty chart makes the case on its own.
Nifty 50 in INR terms: -10.56% year to date and -5.85% over the last year.
Now apply the rupee’s ~12.8% depreciation over the same period, and an Indian investor holding Nifty through a domestic broker has lost on both legs simultaneously.
$NIFTY on Hyperliquid removes both problems:
Underlying exposure: Reliance, HDFC Bank, Infosys, TCS, and the rest of India’s top 50
Settlement: USDC, no rupee exposure
Availability: 24/7, no NSE trading hours or market holidays
The NSE’s Nifty 50 futures market is one of the highest-volume derivatives markets in the world, and if you believe in India’s equity story but want dollar-denominated exposure, this is now a live instrument.
Institutions cannot ignore $HYPE anymore.
21Shares listed THYP on Nasdaq, the first US spot HYPE ETF, recording $1.8 million in trading volume and $1.2 million in net inflows on day one.
A leveraged companion product, TXXH, the 21Shares 2x Long HYPE ETF, launched simultaneously.
What is queued behind it:
Bitwise Hyperliquid Staking ETF (BHYP): next in line, per Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart
Grayscale HYPE ETF (GHYP): awaiting SEC decision
An ETF is a distribution channel and every financial advisor, pension fund, and institutional allocator that cannot hold crypto directly can now access $HYPE through a standard brokerage account.
One more thing.
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See you in the next one!