Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Composable Liquidity

The concept of liquidity begetting liquidity is being taken to new heights by Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has become the go-to platform for traders of perpetual futures, also known as 'perps'. Launched in 2023 by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and iliensinc, Hyperliquid is leveraging its robust order book to provide firms with a unique opportunity to compose with its shared liquidity, rather than fragmenting it. This approach, inspired by the concept of composability in decentralized finance (DeFi), allows permissionless smart contracts to interlock like building blocks, giving rise to innovative tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance HyperCore blockchain, enabling other applications to tap into the platform's shared liquidity. This allows wallets and other exchanges to utilize Hyperliquid as a backend, offering perps trading and other services without having to develop their own infrastructure. As more developers integrate with Hyperliquid, the platform's liquidity deepens, asset variety expands, and network effects intensify. With hundreds of developers, including prominent players like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and VALR, already utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', the platform has generated over $90 million in revenue, according to Flowscan. The platform's growing user base is full of praise for Hyperliquid, with Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, describing it as 'the AWS for finance'. Jung highlights that Hyperliquid is more than just a perpetuals exchange; it's a layer-one blockchain infrastructure that provides liquidity and execution, allowing builders to focus on delivering exceptional user experiences. Similar to AWS, Hyperliquid enables builders to own their users and control the user interface, while providing the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators can charge fees on the notional size of their users' trades without having to develop or maintain the backend infrastructure. For applications like MetaMask, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module makes perfect sense. MetaMask has given its users self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet since October 2025, streamlining fund transfers and allowing users to trade with the tokens they already hold. Being a wallet provides an advantage, as there's no need to connect to a decentralized app (dApp), and fund transfers are seamless. Hyperliquid handles matching, oracle, and margin engine tasks, allowing MetaMask to focus on delivering a great user experience. Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask, notes that matching orders is a challenging task, and Hyperliquid excels at it. By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers exceptional liquidity and execution quality. MetaMask is seeing growth beyond crypto, with real-world asset markets increasing from a small fraction of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today, according to Saint Olive. The company charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, with no hidden spread or execution costs, providing transparency and verifiability for traders. Even large centralized exchanges, like South Africa-based VALR, are turning to Hyperliquid for liquidity requirements. Despite initially building their own infrastructure, including risk and liquidation engines, VALR found it challenging to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity for their perpetual futures. VALR's CEO and co-founder, Farzam Ehsani, candidly admits that their perpetual futures didn't take off as expected due to liquidity and volume issues. However, by integrating with Hyperliquid, VALR can now offer its customers access to a vast pool of liquidity and market participants from around the world. Looking ahead, as major players like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Intercontinental Exchange enter the perps market, opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage will emerge, according to Jung. This will enable traders to maintain positions on multiple platforms, such as Robinhood and Hyperliquid, and capitalize on non-toxic flow, leading to more organic mechanisms for funding rates.