Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals in DeFi's 'Money LEGO' Landscape

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is particularly apt for Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained popularity among traders, especially those interested in perpetual futures or 'perps'. Launched in 2023 by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid has successfully harnessed the power of its order book volume and depth by introducing a concept akin to composability. This DeFi concept allows permissionless smart contracts to seamlessly integrate, much like LEGO blocks, to create novel tokenized financial products. The platform's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance, homegrown HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to build upon Hyperliquid's shared liquidity. This means that applications such as wallets or even other exchanges can utilize Hyperliquid as a backend, offering perps trading and other services without having to fragment the liquidity. As more developers integrate with Hyperliquid, the platform's liquidity deepens, the variety of assets expands, and network effects intensify. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and the South African exchange VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', generating approximately $90 million in revenue. The platform has garnered significant praise from its growing user base. 'Hyperliquid is more than just a perpetuals exchange; it's akin to AWS for finance,' said Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, a U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid's native token HYPE. 'While the perps aspect is impressive, Hyperliquid is essentially a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The primary service offered is liquidity, ensuring that all markets function smoothly and allowing anyone to build on top of them,' Jung explained in an interview. Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders maintain ownership of their users and have full control over the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Integrators of builder codes can charge fees based on the notional size of their users' trades without having to develop the backend or maintain liquidity. 'Builder codes enable integrators to focus on delivering exceptional user experiences, while Hyperliquid handles the backend for liquidity and execution,' said Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs. 'Integrators can offer their users top-notch on-chain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure, earning fees on every trade.' For an application like MetaMask, which boasts over 100 million users worldwide, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module is a logical choice. Since October 2025, MetaMask has provided its users with self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet. As a wallet, MetaMask has the advantage of not requiring a decentralized app connection, and fund transfers are streamlined, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold, according to Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. The wallet plugs into MetaMask's money account, social login, and follow trading, leaving Hyperliquid to handle matching, the oracle, and the margin engine. 'Matching orders is genuinely challenging, and Hyperliquid excels at it, so we don't attempt to rebuild it,' said Saint Olive. 'By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available.' MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond crypto, with commodities and equities becoming increasingly popular, according to Saint Olive. 'Real-world-asset markets have grown from a small fraction of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today.' In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, with no hidden spread and full transparency, allowing traders to verify exactly what they paid. 'We believe that transparency is a significant advantage and are actively exploring innovative pricing models to make our economics a reason people choose MetaMask, not a source of friction,' Saint Olive added. It's notable that a large centralized exchange like VALR has opted to utilize Hyperliquid's perps order book for its liquidity requirements. Despite having built its own infrastructure, including risk and liquidation engines, the team at VALR found it challenging to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity for their perpetual futures. 'Our volume is genuine; we are transparent and don't engage in wash trading or similar practices,' said Farzam Ehsani, CEO and co-founder of VALR. 'We recognized that Hyperliquid was bringing together a substantial amount of volume and market participants from around the world and decided to tap into that.' 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. 'Imagine maintaining one position on Robinhood and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid,' Jung said. 'With a significant amount of non-toxic flow, which occurs when retail users enter and exit the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'