Hyperliquid is the largest onchain perpetuals exchange, commanding roughly 70% of decentralized perps volume and clearing as much as $300 billion in a single month across a fully onchain order book processing 200,000+ orders per second.

Founded in 2023 by former Hudson River Trading engineer Jeff Yan, it runs on a purpose-built Layer 1 using HyperBFT consensus for one-block finality, listing 100+ USDC-margined perp markets at up to 40x leverage with permissionless HIP-3 markets extending into oil, metals, and equities.

The network took no venture capital and pays no market makers. Nearly all protocol fees are converted into HYPE buybacks through the Assistance Fund, and every trade, liquidation, and funding payment settles verifiably onchain through HyperCore and HyperEVM.

Custody works differently from every centralized rival. Users hold their own funds against smart-contract and bridge risk rather than an exchange balance sheet, and the protocol itself has never been hacked, though a validator intervention during the JELLY incident showed governance can act fast when markets are attacked.

Bitget is a top-five perpetuals exchange by open interest, founded in 2018, led by CEO Gracy Chen, and serving more than 100 million users across 150+ countries from its Seychelles base with a Vienna headquarters anchoring its European push.

Its derivatives platform runs USDT-margined, USDC-margined, and coin-margined perpetuals at up to 125x leverage, wrapped in the largest copy trading ecosystem in crypto, where any account can mirror elite traders position for position.

TradFi is the growth engine. Bitget cleared close to $70 billion in traditional-asset perpetuals volume in a single quarter, spanning stock perps that trade 24/7 on USDT margin alongside gold, silver, and forex markets.

Security rests on a Protection Fund pledged at $300 million, monthly Merkle-tree Proof of Reserves showing coverage well above 100%, ISO 27001 and 27701 certification, and a clean hack record since founding, though its EU access currently waits on a pending MiCA application.