Hyperliquid is pushing perp trading deeper into DeFi composability
Liquidity tends to attract more liquidity. Hyperliquid is trying to turn that into a broader market structure, using the scale of its perpetual futures business to become a backend layer for other crypto products.
The decentralized exchange has become a preferred venue for many traders, especially those trading perpetual futures, or perps, blockchain-based derivatives that let users speculate on asset prices with leverage and no expiration date.
Founded by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and the pseudonymous developer iliensinc, Hyperliquid went live at the start of 2023. The company is now using its trading volume and deep order book to offer something close to DeFi composability, the idea that permissionless smart contracts can be stacked together like money LEGOs to create new tokenized financial products.
HyperEVM connects directly to HyperCore
At the center of that design is HyperEVM, Hyperliquid’s Ethereum-compatible environment, which connects directly to the platform’s in-house high-speed blockchain, HyperCore. That setup allows outside applications to build on top of a shared pool of liquidity instead of splitting activity across separate markets.
In practice, wallets and even other exchanges can use Hyperliquid as a backend to offer perp trading and related services. As more teams deploy on the platform or integrate with it, liquidity gets deeper, the range of tradable assets broadens, and the network effects build on themselves.
There are now hundreds of developers using Hyperliquid’s builder codes, including MetaMask, Phantom wallet and South African exchange VALR. Builders have generated about $90 million in revenue so far, according to Flowscan.
Supporters compare the platform to AWS
Some of Hyperliquid’s backers argue the business should be viewed less as an exchange and more as infrastructure. “Hyperliquid is not just a perpetuals exchange, it’s more like the AWS for finance,” said Hansu Jian, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, the first U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid’s native token, HYPE.
In an interview, Jian said the perp venue matters, but the larger story is that Hyperliquid functions as layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The product being offered, he said, is liquidity itself: markets that work well and a system that lets anyone build on top of them.
The comparison to AWS rests on a simple division of labor. Builders keep their users and control the user interface, while Hyperliquid handles liquidity and execution underneath. Integrators using builder codes can charge fees based on the notional size of users’ trades without building their own backend or maintaining their own liquidity base.
“Builder codes let integrators focus on what they do best, delivering a great user experience, while Hyperliquid serves as the backend for liquidity and execution,” Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs, said by email. “Integrators can offer their users best-in-class onchain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure, and earn fees on every trade.”
MetaMask routes perp orders straight into Hyperliquid
MetaMask is one of the clearest examples of that model. The Ethereum-based wallet, which says it has more than 100 million users worldwide, has offered self-custodial access to perps directly inside the wallet since October 2025.
Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask, said the wallet format removes the need for users to connect to a separate decentralized application, while transfers are streamlined enough that users can trade with tokens they already hold. The product ties into MetaMask’s money account, social login and follow trading, while Hyperliquid handles matching, the oracle and the margin engine.
“Matching orders is genuinely hard, and Hyperliquid is excellent at it, so we don’t try to rebuild it,” Saint Olive said by email. “By routing orders straight to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available anywhere.”
MetaMask is also seeing demand move past crypto-native assets. According to Saint Olive, markets tied to real-world assets such as commodities and equities accounted for only a small share of perp volume at the start of 2026 and have since grown to roughly a quarter.
On pricing, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee that is disclosed upfront, with no hidden spread and no cost buried in execution, so traders can verify what they paid. “We think that transparency is the real advantage, and we’re actively exploring more innovative pricing models, because we want the economics to be a reason people choose MetaMask, not a source of friction,” Saint Olive added.
VALR chose Hyperliquid after building its own stack
It is more unusual to see a large centralized exchange rely on Hyperliquid’s perp order book for liquidity. But that path has worked for VALR, the South Africa-based exchange that CEO and co-founder Farzam Ehsani described as one of the largest exchanges in Africa, with close to 2 million retail customers and about 2,000 corporate institutional customers.
Ehsani said VALR began with spot trading, then added spot margin, and later perpetual futures. The company built the full stack internally, including its risk engine and liquidation engine. Even with that work in place, he said, generating enough volume and liquidity was difficult.
“So perpetual futures on our own books didn't take off as we had hoped they would, predominantly because of the liquidity and volume,” Ehsani said in an interview. “Our volume is our volume; we are 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 plug into that?’”
Cross-venue arbitrage could emerge as more firms enter perps
Looking ahead, Jian said broader adoption of perpetuals by platforms such as Robinhood, Coinbase and Intercontinental Exchange could create room for cross-venue arbitrage.
He gave the example of a trader holding one side of a position on Robinhood and the other side on Hyperliquid. In that setup, he said, the presence of more so-called non-toxic flow, where retail users are simply entering and exiting the market, could lead to more organic mechanisms for funding rates.