Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan said on Sept. 18 that HyperCore was built by separating financial functions into standalone modules, drawing a comparison to Amazon Web Services as the model for that design. The same day, HyperCore opened manual borrowing, letting users post HYPE or BTC as collateral to borrow USDC and USDT. Yan said borrowers had more than $400 million in available supply on the first day.
Yan compares HyperCore’s structure to AWS and Unix-style design
In his post on X, Yan said many technology giants in the 2000s built infrastructure and products as one tightly linked unit, while Amazon separated AWS into an independent API layer early on, with Amazon retail becoming only its first user. He added that AWS now generates more profit than Amazon’s other business lines combined.
He said Hyperliquid follows the same logic. Each financial module, in his description, should follow the Unix principle of doing one thing and doing it well, with developers then combining those modules into applications. The report noted that Yan has used the AWS comparison before, previously saying that AWS is to cloud infrastructure what Hyperliquid is to liquidity infrastructure. This time, he tied that idea directly to the rollout of lending.
Manual borrowing goes live as lending sits beneath portfolio margin
Yan used the new borrowing feature to explain the architecture. He said many platforms implement portfolio margin by discounting collateral in an account at market value and generating loans directly, without a clearly identified lender behind each position. That approach is easier to build, he said, but gives up some of the composability between functions.
Under Hyperliquid’s setup, HyperCore first creates a lending module, and every borrowed asset comes from a supplier. That keeps risk inside the lending module instead of letting it spread across the entire platform. Portfolio margin sits on top of that layer and connects lending with perpetuals, spot trading, and event contracts.
Yan listed three outcomes from that structure:
- The manual borrowing feature launched on Sept. 18 is an extension of the lending module rather than a separate new product.
- Idle stablecoins held by portfolio margin users automatically earn yield as a direct result of combining trading and lending.
- Margin for perpetuals and lending is calculated separately, making system safety easier to assess.
Public API shows $408 million in USDC supply, with 68.3% utilization
According to public Hyperliquid API data cited in the report at 6:47 p.m., the USDC lending pool on HyperCore held $408 million in supply, with $279 million already borrowed. That put utilization at 68.3%. Borrowing carried a 5% annual rate, while depositors were earning about 3.08% annualized. At that rate, a $10,000 deposit would generate about $308 in interest over one year.
USDT supply stood at about $2.37 million, much smaller in scale. Total borrowing across three stablecoins was about $280 million, compared with $269 million in the project’s earlier afternoon announcement. According to official documentation, stablecoin borrowing rates stay fixed at 5% while utilization remains below 80%, and only rise once that threshold is exceeded.
Collateral base and remaining borrowing capacity
The lending pool currently holds 10.09 million HYPE and 2,060 BTC as collateral. Based on evening prices cited in the report, those positions were worth about $913 million and $161 million, respectively. Their loan-to-value ratios were listed at 65% for HYPE and 50% for BTC, implying maximum borrowing capacity of about $670 million.
Within that structure, the remaining amount available to borrow from the USDC pool was about $129 million. The report said any further expansion in borrowing size will depend on whether stablecoin supply continues to grow.
Access limits remain in place, while fuller lending products are left to HyperEVM teams
Portfolio margin still comes with access requirements. Official documents state that a main account must either exceed $5 million in weighted trading volume or hold more than $10,000 in account value, while account value must also stay below $25 million. The global supply cap for USDC is set at $1 billion, and the borrowing cap is $500 million.
The documents also say HyperCore is intentionally not building a complete lending marketplace, and deposit positions are not tokenized at this stage. That part is being left to independent teams on HyperEVM. Future upgrades are expected to let smart contracts supply liquidity through CoreWriter, allowing protocols on the EVM side to issue yield-bearing tokens backed by those positions. The report framed that as consistent with Yan’s Unix-style principle: HyperCore provides the base lending layer, while product development is left to external teams.
What the Sept. 18 rollout includes
As summarized in the report, HyperCore’s manual borrowing feature, opened on Sept. 18, allows users to deposit HYPE or BTC as collateral and borrow USDC or USDT. The loan-to-value ratios are 65% for HYPE and 50% for BTC, and the current annual borrowing rate is 5%.
Using the Sept. 18 evening data cited in the article, the USDC lending pool was running at 68.3% utilization, with deposit yields at about 3.08% annualized. As long as stablecoin utilization stays below 80%, the borrowing rate remains fixed at 5%, while idle stablecoins in portfolio margin accounts earn yield automatically.