Liquidity breeds liquidity, they say.
Hyperliquid, as its name suggests, has become the decentralized exchange of choice for many traders, especially those looking to trade perpetual futures or “perps,” blockchain-based derivative contracts that allow users to speculate on the price of an asset with leverage and no expiration date.
Created by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid, which went live in early 2023, leverages its volume and depth of order book by offering companies something akin to composition: the concept of decentralized finance (DeFi), whereby permissionless smart contracts LEGO can place together as money-based financial products.
Hyperliquid’s Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM connects directly to its super-fast homegrown HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to compose on top of the platform’s shared liquidity instead of fragmenting it. In other words, applications like wallets or even other exchanges can piggyback on Hyperliquid by using it as a backend to offer perps trading and other services.
As more builders implement and integrate Hyperliquid, liquidity deepens, asset diversity expands, and network effects amplify. There are now hundreds of developers – including big names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet and South African exchange VALR – using Hyperliquid’s system of “builder codes.” Builders have so far generated about $90 million in revenue, according to Flowscan.
A growing army of acolytes cannot praise the platform enough.
“Hyperliquid is not just a perpetual exchange, it’s more like AWS for finance,” said Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, the first US-listed financial company focused on Hyperliquid’s native token HYPE.
“The perps part is great, but this is really a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The service that’s being offered is actually liquidity and that all these markets work well and allow anyone to build things on top of them,” Jung said in an interview.
Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders own their users and fully control the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators charge fees on the theoretical size of their users’ trades without developing the backend or maintaining liquidity.
“Builder codes let integrators focus on what they do best and deliver a great user experience, while Hyperliquid serves as the backend for liquidity and execution,” said Sterling Barnett, head of business development at Hyperliquid Labs, via email. “Integrators can offer their users best-in-class onchain liquidity and institutional infrastructure and earn fees on every trade.”
For an app like MetaMask, the Ethereum-based wallet that reports over 100 million users worldwide, merging with Hyperliquid’s EVM module makes perfect sense. Since October 2025, MetaMask has given its users self-service access to criminals directly from the wallet.
Being a wallet has the advantage that there is no decentralized app (dApp) to connect to, while money transfers are streamlined to the point where users can trade directly with the tokens they already have, said Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. It connects to MetaMask’s money account, social login and follows trading, leaving Hyperliquid to handle matching, the oracle and the margin engine, he said.
“Matching orders is really hard and Hyperliquid is excellent at that, so we’re not trying to replenish it,” Saint Olive said via email. “By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offer some of the best liquidity and execution quality available anywhere.”
MetaMask said it sees growth beyond crypto in terms of things like commodities and stocks, according to Saint Olive. “Real-world asset markets have gone from a small slice of perp volume at the start of 2026 to about a quarter of that today,” he said.
When it comes to fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% construction fee, disclosed upfront, with no hidden spread and nothing buried in execution, so a trader can verify exactly what they paid. “We believe that transparency is the real benefit and we are actively exploring more innovative pricing models because we want the economics to be a reason for people to choose MetaMask, not a source of friction,” Saint Olive added.
It is more surprising to find a large centralized exchange handing over liquidity requirements to the order book of Hyperliquids perps. But taking the Hyperliquid route has proven to be a good opportunity for South African exchange VALR, ranked among the largest exchanges in Africa with close to two million retail clients and around 2,000 institutional business clients, according to the exchange’s CEO and co-founder, Farzam Ehsani.
After starting by offering clients spot market, spot margin and then perpetuities, the team at VALR built all the infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, Ehsani said. Despite all the hard work that went into launching perpetual futures, Ehsani said frankly that it was difficult to get volume and liquidity.
“So perpetual futures on our own books didn’t take off as we had hoped they would, largely because of liquidity and volume,” Ehsani said in an interview. “Our volume is our volume; we’re truthful and transparent and don’t do any wash trading or anything like that. We saw Hyperliquid bringing a huge amount of volume and market participants from all over the world together and thought, ‘Why don’t we join it?'”
Looking ahead, as the likes of Robinhood, Coinbase, Intercontinental Exchange and others go full throttle in offering perps, there will be opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage, according to Hyperion’s Jung.
“Say you maintain a position on Robinhood, for example, and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid,” Jung said. “So, because you have a lot of what’s called non-toxic flow, which is when more retail users just cleanly enter and leave the market, you’ll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.”
