In brief
- Hyperliquid is a decentralized exchange specializing in perpetual futures.
- The platform has become one of crypto's largest DEXs, processing trillions of dollars in volume since its launch in 2023.
- The project has attracted growing institutional interest through ETF filings, pre-IPO trading markets, and participation in debates over U.S. stablecoin regulation.
Decentralized perpetual futures exchange Hyperliquid has gone from being a market maker to one of the biggest crypto projects in the world.
Hyperliquid has processed trillions of dollars in volume in its lifespan and is now the fifth-largest decentralized exchange by 30-day volume, per DeFiLlama.
But what exactly is Hyperliquid? Why do people care so much about it? And how did it grow to be one of the biggest projects in crypto?
What is Hyperliquid?
Hyperliquid is a decentralized exchange specializing in perpetual futures trading, built atop its own dedicated layer-1 network.
Its native token HYPE has been a roaring success, rising to become a top 10 cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Why do people care about Hyperliquid?
Put simply, Hyperliquid makes it easier for traders to speculate on the price fluctuations of cryptocurrencies, thanks to low fees and a large amount of available assets.
Trading fees on Hyperliquid vary by market type and trading volume. Spot taker fees range from 0.07% for the lowest-volume traders to 0.025% for the highest-volume tier, while perpetual futures maker fees fall to 0% for high-volume traders, according to Hyperliquid docs. Taker orders remove liquidity from the market, while maker orders add liquidity.
Much like a centralized exchange, users can place trades on most of the major coins regardless of what chain they are on. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin—all tradable in one place. Hyperliquid allows traders to control positions worth up to 40 times their collateral, though maximum leverage decreases as position sizes increase.
As a result, it has become a battleground for degenerate wars between whales and the crypto community.
Notably, in March 2025, a whale opened a 40x leveraged short position worth $521 million against Bitcoin, which led to everyday traders teaming up in an attempt to liquidate the whale. Spectators were able to watch every movement on the Hyperliquid block explorer, which openly shows a wallet’s held positions, whether it's in profit, and its liquidation price. The whale won in this instance, dumping the position for a $3.9 million profit.
All of these factors combined have led to Hyperliquid attracting over 1.2 million total users since its 2023 launch and amassing a total volume of $5.91 billion, according to Dune Analytics.
Hyperliquid’s origin story
Hyperliquid was entirely self-funded and was built by a team of just 11 people, founder Jeff Yan told WuBlockchain in August 2025. He said the project rejected venture capital funding because it gives a fake sense of progression; instead, the team wanted to focus on “real progress” by giving value to users—not investors.
In 2020, Yan started to trade crypto and founded a market-making company, the earliest form of Hyperliquid. Two years later, he told the When Shift Happens podcast, its high-frequency market-making offering had effectively “capped out,” as he looked to grow the project.
That’s when Sam Bankman-Fried’s centralized exchange FTX imploded by using customer funds to cover losses at his trading firm, Alameda Research. When a critical mass of users sought to withdraw their funds, their money wasn’t there, and the exchange was caught with its pants down. Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven counts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy, resulting in a 25-year prison sentence.
“All of a sudden, people had a real reason not to trust centralized exchanges—and it wasn’t just mumbo jumbo intellectual stuff, they literally lost all this money, and it was because of centralized exchanges,” Yan told the podcast, calling it a “light bulb moment,” indicating that the world was ready for decentralized finance.
The collapse of FTX, Yan said, was the catalyst that made Hyperliquid “go all in” on building a decentralized exchange.
In February 2023, Hyperliquid’s mainnet closed alpha went live. In its first five months, it claimed to have attracted 4,000 users, with 28 different assets available to trade. It hit full mainnet in August of that same year.
Hyperliquid experienced explosive growth following its $1.6 billion airdrop in November 2024—one of the biggest crypto airdrops of all time.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the platform. In December 2024, Hyperliquid attracted unwanted attention from North Korean hackers snooping for vulnerabilities. A few months later, it faced a liquidation crisis and was forced to delist a Solana meme coin when a trader made a bet so bad that the Hyperliquid Foundation would’ve been forced to cover some losses.
The incident raised concerns around how the exchange handled heavily leveraged positions—with Gracy Chen, CEO of centralized exchange Bitget, claiming it could become “FTX 2.0.”
Hyperliquid has also faced regulatory scrutiny. In May 2026, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority warned that Hyperliquid and the Hyper Foundation were unauthorized and did not have permission to offer or promote financial services in the country.
More recently, Hyperliquid has expanded the types of markets that could be built on its infrastructure through two major upgrades.
USDH
As stablecoins emerged as one of crypto's biggest narratives in 2025, speculation grew that Hyperliquid would launch one of its own. Although founder Jeff Yan said the Hyperliquid Foundation had no plans to issue a native stablecoin, it later sought proposals for a "Hyperliquid-aligned" stablecoin, USDH, ultimately selecting Native Markets over bidders including Ethena, Paxos, and Sky.
Since its launch in September 2025, USDH has accrued a market capitalization of roughly $21.4 million and a circulating supply of about 21.4 million tokens, according to CoinGecko.
The stablecoin's revenue-sharing model directs 50% of reserve yield to the HYPE Assistance Fund and 50% toward growing USDH adoption, making it a key part of Hyperliquid's effort to deepen liquidity and align the protocol's growth with HYPE holders.
In June 2026, the Hyperliquid Policy Center joined Paradigm in challenging proposed U.S. anti-money laundering and sanctions rules for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act. The groups argued that regulators should distinguish between primary stablecoin issuance and secondary-market activity across wallets, DeFi applications, and validators, warning that broad requirements could discourage the use of regulated stablecoins in permissionless networks.
HIP-3 and HIP-4
In October 2025, the HIP-3 upgrade introduced permissionless builder-deployed perpetual markets, allowing third parties to create and operate their own perpetual futures exchanges using Hyperliquid's order books, margining system, and trading infrastructure.
Hyperliquid broadened its offerings beyond traditional perpetual futures with the introduction in February 2026 of HIP-4, a framework for fully collateralized outcome markets. The upgrade enabled prediction markets and other event-based derivatives on the protocol, allowing traders to speculate on specific outcomes through contracts that settle within a predefined range rather than through the leveraged structure commonly used in perpetual trading.
A month later, underscoring the platform’s growing role as a 24/7 venue for macro trading when traditional markets were closed, traders turned to Hyperliquid for oil-linked perpetual futures as the conflict between the United States and Iran intensified. The activity also reflected Hyperliquid’s expansion beyond crypto-native perpetuals into synthetic exposure tied to commodities and global events.
In May 2026, Hyperliquid attracted growing institutional attention as Bitwise and 21Shares filed for HYPE exchange-traded funds. That same month, Intercontinental Exchange founder Jeff Sprecher described Hyperliquid as “bigger than Nasdaq” by volume, while the platform continued expanding beyond crypto markets into real-world assets, commodities, equities, and pre-IPO trading. Hyperliquid also reported that HIP-3 had processed more than $120 billion in volume for pre-IPO markets tied to companies including SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
The future of Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid has proven to be relatively drama-free since its early growing pains, and has quickly established itself as a player in the crypto space.
As of this writing, Hyperliquid ranks as the eighth-largest DeFi chain by TVL according to CoinGecko, ahead of networks like Aptos, Avalanche, and Linea.
Hyperliquid’s next challenge, however, may come from outside crypto. As perpetual futures gain wider acceptance, traditional financial institutions are beginning to enter a market long dominated by crypto-native exchanges.
In May 2026, Intercontinental Exchange CEO Jeffrey Sprecher said the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange was studying Hyperliquid's 24/7 trading model and discussing whether regulated U.S. exchanges should be allowed to offer similar perpetual futures products. Kalshi has already launched Bitcoin perpetual futures in the United States, while Coinbase is expanding institutional access to global perpetual futures markets.
The following month, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes predicted that Wall Street firms and major exchanges would eventually launch competing perpetual futures products of their own.
Hyperliquid helped popularize on-chain perpetuals and remains the category leader today, but as the product moves into the financial mainstream, the question is no longer whether competition is coming—it's whether Hyperliquid can maintain its edge once traditional exchanges enter the market.
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