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.

MEXC is the highest-leverage major perpetuals venue, founded in 2018 and now serving more than 40 million users across 170+ countries from its Seychelles base. Its catalog of 3,000+ listed tokens is among the largest in the industry.

The futures platform runs 700+ perpetual pairs at up to 500x leverage with the lowest standard fee schedule of any major exchange, charging nothing on maker orders and 0.02% on takers before MX token discounts.

Its regulatory posture is the trade-off. MEXC holds no license from a major financial regulator and has drawn warnings from authorities including Germany's BaFin, the UK's FCA, and Hong Kong's SFC, so users trade without the consumer protections regulated venues carry.

Security rests on verifiable reserves rather than oversight. Monthly Hacken-audited Proof of Reserves shows major assets backed well above 100%, a $100 million Guardian Fund with public wallet addresses backstops users, and no exchange-level hack has been confirmed since founding.