Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Composability and Shared Liquidity

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity has become a guiding principle for Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained significant traction among traders, particularly those interested in perpetual futures or 'perps'. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid has been live since the beginning of 2023 and has capitalized on the depth and volume of its order book by introducing a novel concept: composability. This DeFi concept allows permissionless smart contracts to seamlessly integrate, much like LEGO blocks, to create new tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance HyperCore blockchain, enabling other applications to build on top of the platform's shared liquidity without fragmenting it. This means that applications such as wallets or even other exchanges can utilize Hyperliquid as a backend to offer perps trading and other services, effectively creating a network effect where liquidity deepens and the variety of assets expands as more builders deploy on and integrate with the platform. The list of developers leveraging Hyperliquid's system of 'builder codes' has grown to include prominent names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and South African exchange VALR, with hundreds of developers generating approximately $90 million in revenue to date, according to Flowscan. The platform has garnered significant praise from its users, with Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, likening Hyperliquid to 'the AWS for finance'. Jung emphasized that Hyperliquid is more than just a perpetuals exchange; it provides a layer-one blockchain infrastructure that offers liquidity and allows builders to create on top of it. Similar to AWS, builders on Hyperliquid own their users and have full control over the user interface, while the platform provides the underlying liquidity and execution. This enables builder code integrators to charge fees on the notional size of their users' trades without having to develop the backend or maintain liquidity. For instance, MetaMask, a popular Ethereum-based wallet with over 100 million users worldwide, has integrated Hyperliquid's EVM module, enabling users to access perps directly from the wallet since October 2025. This integration has streamlined fund transfers, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold. Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask, highlighted the advantages of this integration, stating that Hyperliquid handles matching, oracle, and margin engine tasks, while MetaMask focuses on delivering a seamless user experience. 'Matching orders is genuinely hard, and Hyperliquid is excellent at it, so we don't try to rebuild it,' Saint Olive said. By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available. The platform has also seen growth beyond crypto, with real-world-asset markets now accounting for roughly a quarter of perp volume, according to Saint Olive. In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, with no hidden spread or execution costs, providing transparency and verifiability for traders. The company is actively exploring innovative pricing models to make its economics a key advantage, rather than a source of friction. Even large centralized exchanges, such as South Africa-based VALR, have opted to utilize Hyperliquid's perps order book for their liquidity requirements. Despite having built their own infrastructure, including risk and liquidation engines, the team at VALR found it challenging to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity for their perpetual futures offerings. According to Farzam Ehsani, CEO and co-founder of VALR, the exchange decided to integrate with Hyperliquid due to its impressive volume and global market participant base. This partnership has enabled VALR to offer its customers a more robust perps trading experience. 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 could lead to more organic mechanisms for funding rates, as traders maintain positions on multiple platforms and capitalize on differences in market prices.