Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid’s development team did proprietary market making in crypto in 2020 and expanded into decentralized finance (DeFi) in the summer of 2022. Believing that existing DeFi trading platforms suffered from poor market design, bad technology and clunky user experience, the team set out to build a high-performance decentralized layer-one blockchain with an order book exchange built in. After FTX collapsed in November 2022, the team stopped its market-making business and committed fully to the project.⁠[1][1][1][2][2]

Existing blockchains were too slow and too expensive to handle the constant stream of order placements and cancellations an order book requires, so after evaluating the available chains the team decided to build its own, producing a custom chain capable of running an exchange within three months.⁠[2][2][2]

At the end of February 2023, Hyperliquid’s mainnet went live as a closed alpha, and the full mainnet opened that August. The team did not pay market makers, and early users were largely NFT collectors who had never traded perpetual futures.⁠[2][3][3][2][2]

In May 2023, the team put its former market-making strategies into an onchain vault called HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider), into which anyone could deposit and share in the profit and loss, with no management fee or carry. HLP is a fully community-owned protocol vault that provides liquidity through multiple market-making strategies, performs liquidations and accrues a portion of trading fees; deposits are locked for four days.⁠[2][2][4][4][4]

On November 1, 2023, Hyperliquid launched a points program, distributing 1 million points to users weekly for six months until May 1, 2024, with referrers earning one point for every four earned by their referred users; the L1 phase of points distributed 700,000 points weekly from May 29, 2024 until November 2024. The program had no published formula.⁠[5][5][5][2]

On January 28, 2024, the team announced four principles: no investors, no paid market makers, no fees to the development team and no insiders. That spring, daily volume exceeded $1 billion and the platform experienced its first downtime.⁠[2][2][2]

Hyperliquid then expanded from perpetual futures into spot trading; the first token listed was PURR, named after its cat mascot. Spot trading rests on HIP-1, a capped-supply fungible token standard with onchain spot order books, while HIP-2 provides Hyperliquidity, a Uniswap-inspired onchain market-making strategy with no operators, to bootstrap liquidity for new tokens.⁠[2][6][7][7]

In May 2024, to support spot trading without taking custody of user assets, the team decided to open the chain as a programmable platform, and for the first time stated the goal that Hyperliquid would “house all of finance.”⁠[2][2][2]

On November 29, 2024, Hyperliquid held its genesis event, distributing 310 million HYPE, 31% of the 1 billion total supply, to roughly 94,000 early users with no conditions or vesting; at the opening price of $3.90 the distribution was worth about $1.2 billion. Of the remaining supply, 38.8% was allocated to future emissions and community rewards, 6% to the Hyper Foundation treasury and 0.3% to grants, while core contributors received 23.8% (locked for one year, vesting until after 2028); private investors, centralized exchanges and market makers received no allocation.⁠[8][8][2][8][8][8]

HYPE is the network’s staking asset and the gas token for HyperEVM. Hyperliquid uses delegated proof of stake: validators must self-delegate 10,000 HYPE (locked for one year) and produce blocks and earn rewards in proportion to delegated stake; transfers from staking back to spot go through a seven-day unstaking queue, and there is currently no automatic slashing.⁠[8][9][9][9][9]

In December 2024, MetaMask security researcher Taylor Monahan identified wallets suspected of being controlled by North Korean hackers that had been trading on Hyperliquid since at least October of that year, raising concerns that the activity could be reconnaissance ahead of an attack; the platform then saw roughly $250 million in net outflows.⁠[10][10]

On March 12, 2025, a whale intentionally let a roughly $200 million long Ether position be liquidated, forcing HLP to take it over at unfavorable prices and costing HLP depositors about $4 million; Hyperliquid subsequently raised collateral requirements for large positions.⁠[11][11][11]

On March 26, a trader opened a large short on the illiquid JELLY token and then pumped its price onchain to self-liquidate, passing the position to HLP, whose unrealized losses at one point exceeded $12 million. Within minutes validators voted to delist JELLY perpetuals and settle them at the pre-manipulation price, and legitimate users were made whole. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen criticized the move as putting Hyperliquid at risk of becoming “FTX 2.0,” and the episode raised questions about its small validator set and degree of decentralization; fixing the underlying issues took a month.⁠[11][2][2][11][11][11][2]

Data provider RedStone estimated in August 2025 that Hyperliquid held more than 80% of the decentralized perpetual futures market, with daily volume above $30 billion.⁠[12]

On September 14, after a roughly weeklong contest, Hyperliquid validators voted to select Native Markets to issue USDH, a Hyperliquid-aligned stablecoin; its proposal won about 70% of validator votes, beating bidders including PaxosPaxosPaxos is a blockchain-infrastructure company founded in 2012 and led by CEO Charles Cascarilla. It provides enterprises with digital-asset custody, trading, settlement and stablecoin-issuance technology. Its associated assets include PYUSD, USDP, PAXG and USDG, with issuer entities and regulatory oversight varying by asset.Open the full entry, Frax, Sky and Ethena, and USDH launched that month.⁠[13][13][3][3]

On October 10, 2025, Trump announced an additional 100% tariff on Chinese imports, triggering more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto liquidations within 24 hours, the largest single-day liquidation event on record. On Hyperliquid, more than 1,000 wallets were fully liquidated and over $1.23 billion in trader capital was wiped out; CoinGlass counted about $10 billion of the weekend’s $19.3 billion in liquidations on Hyperliquid. The platform had no downtime and halted no withdrawals, and HLP earned about $40 million backstopping liquidations.⁠[14][14][14][15][2][2]

On October 13, 2025, Hyperliquid activated the HIP-3 upgrade, allowing any deployer staking 500,000 HYPE to permissionlessly deploy its own perpetual futures markets on HyperCore, defining contract specifications, oracles and leverage limits and sharing in trading fees; if a deployer operates a market maliciously, validators can slash its stake through a stake-weighted vote.⁠[15][16][16][16][16]

In November 2025, someone withdrew $3 million in USDC from OKXOKXOKX is a global digital-asset trading platform that began operating in 2017 under the name OKEx. Different regional entities provide trading, wallet, payment and related services; the global platform, OKCoin and locally licensed entities must be distinguished.Open the full entry, split it across 19 wallets and built a leveraged long of $20 million to $30 million in POPCAT, then pumped and dumped the price by placing and pulling large buy orders, triggering cascading liquidations; the attacker’s own $3 million in collateral was wiped out and HLP absorbed about $4.9 million in bad debt.⁠[17][17][17]

In October 2025, Hyperliquid processed about $308 billion in volume and had more than 570,000 users. For the full year, the protocol earned about $900 million in profit, 99% of which was automatically used to buy back and burn HYPE; third-party developers charging per-order fees in their own trading apps through builder codes had earned more than $70 million since October 2024.⁠[18][18][2][2][2]

On February 18, 2026, the Hyperliquid Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, was launched with crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky as founder and CEO, focusing on regulatory frameworks for decentralized exchanges, perpetual futures and related areas; the Hyper Foundation contributed 1 million HYPE (about $29 million) to fund it.⁠[19][19][19]

That month, Hyperliquid announced the HIP-4 outcome contract framework: fully collateralized contracts that settle within a fixed range, usable for prediction markets and bounded options-like instruments, without leverage or liquidations; the first market is a recurring binary contract settling daily at 06:00 UTC to the BTC mark price.⁠[2][20][20][20]

In late February 2026, when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran while the CME was closed for the weekend, daily volume in the crude oil perpetual deployed on Hyperliquid by Trade[XYZ] jumped from $21 million to $3.7 billion; a month later Trade[XYZ] launched a round-the-clock S&P 500 perpetual officially licensed by S&P Dow Jones Indices. In March, open interest in HIP-3 markets hit a record $1.2 billion, and only seven of the top 30 markets were crypto pairs.⁠[2][2][21][21]

On May 12, 2026, 21Shares21Shares21Shares is an issuer of crypto asset exchange-traded products (ETPs) headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, which lists physically backed crypto ETPs on several European exchanges and issues products in the United States such as the ARK 21Shares spot Bitcoin ETF; in November 2025 it was acquired by the digital asset prime broker FalconX.Open the full entry’ Hyperliquid ETF (THYP) began trading on Nasdaq, Bitwise’s BHYP listed on the New York Stock Exchange three days later, and on June 3 Grayscale launched a staking ETF (HYPG). In May, HIP-4 outcome contracts were expanded to offchain events such as U.S. inflation data and Federal Reserve rate decisions, with validators ingesting information through automated newsfeed software, deciding which markets to list and voting on settlement.⁠[22][22][22][23][23]

On May 21, the UK Financial Conduct Authority added Hyperliquid to its warning list, saying it may be providing or promoting financial services in the UK without permission and urging the public to avoid dealing with it; the listing named hyperfoundation.org, app.hyperliquid.xyz and its social channels. Hyperliquid’s official X profile states that it is not directed at UK persons.⁠[24][24][24][25][26]

On August 19, 2026, at a White House event with crypto and technology executives, Trump said Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion; he did not describe what form that would take, and his remarks did not mean the commission had approved it. Until then, U.S. users could not use Hyperliquid to trade derivatives.⁠[27][27][27][2]

On August 31, data reviewed by blockchain analytics firm Arkham at CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry’s request showed that wallets linked to North Korea’s Lazarus GroupLazarus GroupLazarus Group is a name used by cybersecurity researchers and governments for North Korean state-sponsored cyber operations involving espionage, destructive attacks and financial theft. Definitions and subgroup boundaries vary between sources. The U.S. Treasury attributes the group to North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau and sanctioned it in 2019.Open the full entry had sold more than $30 million in bitcoin on Hyperliquid over the previous three weeks, converting the proceeds into ether and Solana before moving them to other exchanges; Hyperliquid did not respond to requests for comment.⁠[10][10][10]

In September 2026, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged Robinhood engineers Hefu Chai and Huaisong Xiang with commodities fraud and wire fraud, alleging that between 2025 and 2026 they used confidential listing information to buy perpetual futures on the relevant tokens on Hyperliquid ahead of Robinhood’s announcements, each profiting more than $50,000; prosecutors said using perpetuals on a decentralized platform did not shield the trades from fraud laws. These are allegations and there has been no conviction.⁠[28][28][28][28][28]

On September 16, KrakenKrakenKraken is a digital-asset trading platform founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell and Thanh Luu and launched for trading in 2013. As Payward’s flagship brand, it has expanded into spot and derivatives trading, equities, tokenized assets, custody and payments through jurisdiction-specific entities.Open the full entry parent Payward announced plans to act as a HIP-3 deployer through its CFTC-regulated Bitnomial exchange and offer U.S. clients perpetual futures on Hyperliquid’s public blockchain, with NinjaTrader Clearing carrying client accounts and matching and recordkeeping remaining onchain on Hyperliquid, subject to regulatory approval.⁠[29][29][29][29]

As of October 2026, Hyperliquid had processed more than $5 trillion in cumulative perpetual futures volume. Hypercall, an options platform built on Hyperliquid, had recorded $640 million in notional volume since launching in June 2026, more than 80% of it in S&P 500 options.⁠[10][30]

Hyperliquid is a layer-one blockchain written and optimized from first principles, using HyperBFT, a custom consensus algorithm inspired by HotStuff and its successors; as on most proof-of-stake chains, validators produce blocks in proportion to stake. State execution is split into two parts: HyperCore contains fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books, with every order, cancel, trade and liquidation happening transparently onchain with one-block finality inherited from HyperBFT; HyperEVM is an Ethereum-compatible general-purpose smart contract platform that shares the same consensus as HyperCore and can read order book prices directly.⁠[31][31][32][31][33]

Mainnet handles about 200,000 orders per second, with execution as the bottleneck; for orders from a geographically co-located client, median end-to-end latency is 0.2 seconds. Validators publish spot oracle prices for each perpetual asset every three seconds, using a weighted median of mid prices from Binance, OKX, Bybit and other exchanges as well as Hyperliquid spot. To reduce market makers’ reliance on low-latency infrastructure, the protocol offers a data-read priority auction and order-write priority fees. USDC is natively minted on the Hyperliquid L1, and the legacy Arbitrum bridge contract was audited by Zellic.⁠[32][32][34][34][35][36][37]

Core development is led by Hyperliquid LabsHyperliquid LabsHyperliquid Labs is a Singapore-based blockchain software development company led by Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous co-founder known as iliensinc, and is the core developer of the Hyperliquid blockchain and its built-in exchange. Its predecessor was the crypto quantitative trading team Chameleon Trading, and it is known for its team of about 11 people, full self-funding and refusal to take venture capital.Open the full entry, with multiple teams contributing to the blockchain and ecosystem; development has been fully self-funded, with no venture capital or outside money. The Hyper Foundation is an independent body supporting the ecosystem that runs Foundation validators and a delegation program. About 99% of protocol fees go to buying back HYPE.⁠[38][2][39][39][22]

Hyperliquid: Official website: https://hyperliquid.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[40]

Hyper Foundation: Official website: https://hyperfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://x.com/HyperliquidX (opens in a new window)⁠[26]