Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals with DeFi's Modular Finance

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity has become a guiding principle for Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has quickly gained popularity among traders, particularly those interested in perpetual futures, or 'perps.' These blockchain-based derivatives contracts allow users to speculate on asset prices with leverage and no expiration date. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid has capitalized on the depth and volume of its order book by introducing a concept akin to composability, a key principle in decentralized finance (DeFi). This concept allows permissionless smart contracts to interlock seamlessly, much like LEGO blocks, to create new tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance, homegrown HyperCore blockchain, enabling other applications to build upon the platform's shared liquidity rather than fragmenting it. 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 develop their own infrastructure. 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 system of 'builder codes.' These builders have generated approximately $90 million in revenue to date, according to Flowscan. 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, the first U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid's native token, HYPE. 'The perps aspect is just one part of it; this is essentially a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The service provided is actually liquidity, ensuring that all these 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 serves as the backend for liquidity and execution,' said Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs, via email. '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 step. MetaMask has provided its users with self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet since October 2025. As a wallet, MetaMask has the advantage of not requiring a decentralized app (dApp) 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 integration plugs into MetaMask's money account, social login, and follow trading, leaving Hyperliquid to handle matching, the oracle, and the margin engine, he explained. 'Matching orders is genuinely challenging, and Hyperliquid excels at it, so we don't attempt to rebuild it,' said Saint Olive via email. 'By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available anywhere.' MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond crypto, venturing into areas like commodities and equities, according to Saint Olive. 'Real-world-asset markets have evolved from a small fraction of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today,' he noted. In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, disclosed upfront, with no hidden spread and nothing buried in execution, allowing traders to verify exactly what they paid. 'We believe that transparency is a significant advantage, and we're actively exploring more innovative pricing models, as we want the economics to be a reason people choose MetaMask, not a source of friction,' Saint Olive added. It's more surprising to find a large centralized exchange relying on Hyperliquid's perps order book for liquidity. However, taking the Hyperliquid route has proven beneficial for the South African exchange VALR, ranked among the largest exchanges in Africa with close to two million retail customers and about 2,000 corporate institutional customers, according to the exchange's CEO and co-founder, Farzam Ehsani. Initially, VALR offered customers spot market, spot margin, and then perpetuals, building all the infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, Ehsani said. Despite the effort invested in launching perpetual futures, Ehsani candidly admitted that it was challenging to achieve volume and liquidity. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't engage in wash trading or similar practices. We saw Hyperliquid bringing together a huge amount of volume and market participants from all over the world and thought, 'Why not plug into that?' ' Ehsani said in an interview. Looking ahead, when major players like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Intercontinental Exchange fully enter the perps market, there will be opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage, according to Jung of Hyperion. 'Imagine maintaining one position on Robinhood, for example, and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid,' Jung said. 'Then, because you have a lot of what's called non-toxic flow, which is when more retail users are just purely entering and exiting the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'