What is Hyperliquid?
Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual futures exchange holding roughly 70% of all onchain perps volume, having processed over $4 trillion in cumulative trades from a team of around a dozen people and no venture backing. Rather than the AMM pools most DeFi venues use, it runs a fully onchain central limit order book on a custom Layer 1, delivering execution speed and depth that competes directly with centralized exchanges in our perpetual exchange rankings.
Founder Jeff Yan, a former Hudson River Trading engineer, built the chain around HyperBFT consensus for sub-second finality, and the HyperEVM environment lets smart contracts and DeFi applications compose against the exchange's liquidity. Growth metrics across volume, users, and open interest are tracked in our Hyperliquid statistics report.
Hyperliquid Perpetual Futures Fees
Hyperliquid charges a base 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker fee on perpetuals, per the official fee schedule, and no gas applies to trading. Tiers key off rolling 14-day volume across perps and spot combined, recalculating at every fill, and sub-account plus vault activity aggregates to the master wallet, so tier progress is never fragmented across accounts.
At the Diamond tier, above $500 million in 14-day volume, takers pay 0.026% and makers pay nothing, while dedicated liquidity providers earn rebates reaching 0.003% for wallets supplying over 3% of maker volume. Staking HYPE stacks a separate discount of up to 40% on top of any volume tier. The complete tier map including staking bands is broken down in our Hyperliquid fees guide, and the COINPERPS referral code takes a further 4% off.
How Hyperliquid Funding Rates Work
Hyperliquid settles funding every hour, paying one-eighth of a computed 8-hour rate each interval, a cadence that changes carry economics compared with the 8-hour venues. Per the protocol's funding documentation, the premium between contract and oracle price is sampled every 5 seconds and averaged across the hour, using impact prices, the average execution cost for a defined notional against the live book, rather than raw quotes that a thin market could paint.
Oracle prices come from the validator set as a liquidity-weighted median of centralized exchange spot prices, and rates are capped at 4% per hour for extreme conditions. Hourly settlement means positions pay for exactly as long as they're held, which makes short-duration trading cheaper than on 8-hour venues but lets crowded long-tail markets reprice against you 24 times a day. Hyperliquid rates against every other venue run live on the CoinPerps funding rates dashboard.
Hyperliquid Perpetual Contract Types & Leverage
All Hyperliquid perpetuals are linear USDC-margined contracts, funded by bridging USDC to the chain, a process walked through in our guide to depositing USDC on Hyperliquid. Margin runs in cross or isolated mode per position, sub-accounts separate strategies under one wallet, and leverage reaches 40x on the deepest markets.
Vaults are the structural feature no centralized rival replicates. Anyone can deposit into HLP, the protocol's own market-making and liquidation vault, sharing in its profit and loss, and any trader can launch a public vault that others copy into with aligned incentives. Liquidations execute onchain and visibly, feeding the totals on our liquidations tracker, and positions that gap past bankruptcy fall to HLP's backstop rather than a hidden insurance fund.
Hyperliquid TradFi & Commodity Perpetuals
Hyperliquid's traditional-asset markets run through HIP-3, the protocol upgrade letting outside builders deploy their own perpetual markets on Hyperliquid's infrastructure by staking HYPE, a mechanism unpacked in our HIP-3 explainer. Instead of one company choosing listings, independent deployers have brought oil, gold, silver, equities, and index markets onchain.
The results moved real volume. Hyperliquid's never-expiring oil contracts have generated on the order of $1.6 billion in daily volume during active periods, a figure that pushed ICE and OKX into launching their own competing product, and silver perps have printed above $1 billion in a single day. These markets trade around the clock against oracle feeds while the underlying commodity and equity venues close nightly, giving Hyperliquid weekend price discovery no traditional exchange offers.
Hyperliquid Licenses & Regulation
Hyperliquid holds no licenses from any financial regulator, and there is no company positioned to hold them in the way a centralized exchange does. The protocol runs on a validator-operated Layer 1, the interface is published under the Hyper Foundation, and usage is governed by the foundation's terms of service rather than a regulated entity's client agreement. No MiCA authorization exists, and how European rules will treat decentralized venues in the end remains unsettled, which is why unlicensed access persists where centralized rivals were forced out.
No enforcement settlement has been brought against the protocol to date. The open question regulators circle is whether validator governance makes Hyperliquid decentralized in substance, sharpened when validators voted to intervene in a live market during the JELLY incident. The jurisdiction picture is maintained in our Hyperliquid restricted countries list.
Where is Hyperliquid Available?
Hyperliquid's official interface blocks perpetuals access from the United States, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, while most of the rest of the world trades without account approval or identity checks. The protocol itself is permissionless infrastructure, so the restriction operates at the interface layer rather than the chain, a distinction with real legal weight that our guide on using Hyperliquid in the USA covers along with the risks Americans take by working around it.
In the EU, access continues without a MiCA license because the regulation targets service providers rather than protocols, an asymmetry that has pulled European volume toward onchain venues as licensed exchanges gate their derivatives under MiFID rules.
Is Hyperliquid Safe?
Hyperliquid replaces custodial risk with protocol risk, and the distinction cuts both ways. Funds stay in user wallets rather than an exchange balance sheet, every position and liquidation is verifiable onchain, and the core protocol has never been hacked. The concentrated exposure sits in the bridge holding USDC collateral and in the validator set that secures the chain and computes its oracles.
The honest stress tests are on the record. In March 2025 validators voted to delist and force-settle the JELLY market mid-squeeze after an attacker weaponized the liquidation engine, a manual intervention that protected HLP depositors at the cost of the neutrality a DEX claims. An oversized ETH position unwind in the same period handed HLP a multimillion dollar loss and prompted tighter margin parameters. Protocol economics stayed intact through both, and fee tracking on DefiLlama shows 99% of trading fees converting to HYPE buybacks through the Assistance Fund. Risk never reaches zero here, it changes shape, from a counterparty's balance sheet to smart contracts, bridges, and 21st-century governance.
How Does Hyperliquid Compare to Other Perpetual Exchanges?
Hyperliquid competes in both directions at once. Against centralized giants it trades custody and transparency for their fiat rails and licensing, a structural contest mapped in our perp DEX vs CEX comparison, and its base fees now undercut several of them outright, detailed in the Hyperliquid vs Binance fee breakdown. Against other onchain venues the contest is already settled on volume, where it dwarfs every challenger in our decentralized perpetual exchange rankings.
The trade-offs are leverage, capped at 40x against the 100x to 500x offshore venues offer, and the absence of any regulated wrapper for institutions that require one. Positioning across the whole market, centralized and onchain together, updates in real time on the open interest dashboard.