Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid is a blockchain built for trading. Its core, HyperCore, holds the order books, margin accounts and liquidation engine for perpetual futures and spot markets, so every order, cancel, trade and liquidation is a transaction on the chain. A second layer, the HyperEVM, runs Ethereum-style smart contracts that can use HyperCore's markets and balances. The docs say HyperCore handles about 200,000 orders a second with one-block finality from its HyperBFT consensus.

Several organizations are involved. Hyperliquid Labs describes itself as a core contributor, led by Jeff (who posts as @chameleon_jeff) and iliensinc, classmates from Harvard, with a team from Caltech and MIT that ran a crypto market-making business in 2020 and moved into DeFi in the summer of 2022. Labs says it is self-funded and has taken no outside capital. The interface at app.hyperliquid.xyz is offered by Hyperliquid Corp. under terms updated on 15 June 2026. The Hyper Foundation runs five validators and the bug bounty program.

HYPE is the chain's native token. It is staked with validators to secure the chain, pays gas on the HyperEVM, sets fee discounts for stakers and is what the assistance fund buys and burns with trading fees.

Traders deposit USDC, which Circle now mints natively on Hyperliquid, and trade from a margin account tied to their wallet address. The order book works like a centralized exchange's, with limit and market orders, take-profit and stop-loss orders, sub-accounts and an API, but the matching runs on validators rather than on a company's servers. Sign-in works with a wallet or with an email address.

• HLP. The Hyperliquidity Provider is a protocol vault that runs market-making strategies, takes over liquidated positions and earns a share of fees. Anyone can deposit, and depositors share its profit and loss, which makes HLP a counterparty to traders.
• HIP-3 markets. Builders who stake 500,000 HYPE can deploy their own perpetual markets with their own oracles and settings. This is how markets on stocks, indexes and commodities such as oil appear on Hyperliquid; the deployer, not the validators, sets their prices and can settle them.
• Auto-deleveraging. If an account goes negative and liquidation cannot cover it, profitable traders on the other side are closed out at the previous mark price, ranked by profit and leverage, so the platform carries no bad debt.
• Outcome markets. The interface also offers outcome markets, which the terms restrict further by jurisdiction.

Fees depend on 14-day volume, with spot volume counted double, and are set at the end of each UTC day. Staking HYPE adds a discount of up to 40% on the base rate, and maker rebates are paid on each trade. The docs say no fees go to the team: they go to HLP, the assistance fund and, for HIP-3 and spot assets, to the deployers, who may keep up to half.

HIP-3 markets can cost more or less. Deployers can add a fee share of up to 300%, which also raises the protocol's fee, or switch on growth mode for markets that do not overlap with existing ones, cutting all-in taker fees to 0.0045% to 0.009%. Funding payments between longs and shorts are separate from trading fees and can outweigh them on positions held for days.

Validators decide more on Hyperliquid than on most chains, because the exchange is part of the chain. They vote on delisting markets, on stripping assets of quote-asset status and on disabling ineligible HIP-3 markets. Their power showed on 26 March 2025, when the validator set voted to delist the JELLYJELLY perpetual after what Hyperliquid called suspicious market activity and settled open positions at $0.0095, a price that critics, including the publication Rekt, said was far below the market. The vote reversed a loss in HLP that had passed $11 million.

Stake is concentrated. On 29 October 2026 the network had 27 active validators, and the five run by the Hyper Foundation held about 47% of active stake. Under HyperBFT any group with more than two-thirds of stake forms a quorum. The docs ask stakers to delegate only to validators they trust and note that no automatic slashing is in place yet.

Funds on HyperCore are controlled by the user's private key, not by a company account, and Hyperliquid Corp.'s terms say any interaction with Hyperliquid through its interface is at the user's own risk. That is different from custody risk at an exchange, but the chain itself and its validators hold the balances.

Published security reviews are thin. The docs list Zellic audits of the legacy Arbitrum bridge, which now holds under 10% of HyperCore's USDC, and point to Circle's own audits for USDC contracts. We found no published audit of HyperCore or of the node software. The bug bounty pays in USDC for bugs that cause outages or logic errors on nodes or API servers; it publishes no maximum, requires KYC, and reports go by email to the Hyper Foundation.

The losses so far have come from market design, not from stolen keys or contract bugs. In March 2025 a trader offloaded a roughly $4 million loss onto HLP through a deliberate liquidation, after which leverage caps were cut. Two weeks later came the JELLYJELLY delisting. In November 2025 a manipulation of POPCAT left about $4.9 million of losses in HLP. Each time, HLP depositors carried the cost or the validators stepped in. Our article on what exchange insurance funds cover explains why a pooled backstop like HLP is not a guarantee.

• Leverage. Liquidations are fast, and auto-deleveraging can close a profitable position early.
• HLP. Depositors earn fees but absorb losses when liquidations fail or markets are manipulated.
• HIP-3 markets. Their deployer controls the oracle and can settle the market.
• Validator decisions. A vote can delist a market and set its settlement price.

The interface terms exclude "Restricted Persons": anyone residing in, located in or incorporated in the United States or Ontario, Canada, anyone in a jurisdiction under applicable sanctions or export controls, and citizens of those sanctioned territories wherever they live. Outcome markets have a further list of excluded persons.

There is no KYC to trade through the interface. Because the chain is public, other front ends and the API can reach it, but the terms of the operator you use still apply to you.

To start, connect a wallet or sign in with email at app.hyperliquid.xyz and deposit USDC. Circle's cross-chain transfer protocol moves USDC from Arbitrum directly onto HyperCore, and the docs' support pages cover deposits via Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Base and other networks. Moving funds between the perps and spot accounts, or to the HyperEVM, is a separate transfer inside the app.

Withdrawing means sending USDC or other assets back out to a supported chain from the app. Two products have waiting periods: HLP deposits can only be withdrawn 4 days after the latest deposit, and staked HYPE takes 7 days to return to the spot account, with at most five pending unstakes per address.

Support runs through tickets. The docs' support guide asks users to search it first, then open a ticket in the "open-ticket" channel of the official Discord or through a Zendesk web form; replies can take up to 48 hours, longer at weekends. Support happens only inside the ticket channel, and the guide warns that direct messages come from impersonators.

Applications on the HyperEVM are built by independent teams and have their own support. Nobody from Hyperliquid will ask for a seed phrase, password or private key.

The team behind Hyperliquid did proprietary crypto market making in 2020 and turned to decentralized trading in the summer of 2022. Its GitHub organization dates from March 2023.

• March 2025: a deliberate ETH liquidation costs HLP about $4 million; leverage caps are cut. Later that month validators delist JELLYJELLY.
• November 2025: a POPCAT manipulation leaves about $4.9 million of losses in HLP.
• By 2026: USDC is natively minted on Hyperliquid, HIP-3 lets builders who stake HYPE create markets, and outcome markets are live.
• June 2026: the interface terms are updated, naming Hyperliquid Corp. as operator.

For a comparison with other venues, see how Hyperliquid compares with other perpetual exchanges. Circle, which issues the USDC used as collateral, has its own profile.