Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Composable Liquidity

The concept that liquidity attracts liquidity holds true, and Hyperliquid has emerged as a top choice for traders seeking to engage with perpetual futures, or 'perps,' which are blockchain-based derivatives contracts allowing users to speculate on asset prices with leverage and no expiration date. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and the pseudonymous developer iliensinc, Hyperliquid has been live since early 2023 and is now capitalizing on the depth and volume of its order book by offering a form of composability. This concept, borrowed from decentralized finance (DeFi), allows permissionless smart contracts to interlock like financial building blocks, giving rise to novel 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 without fragmenting it. In essence, applications such as wallets or even other exchanges can utilize Hyperliquid as a backend, providing perps trading and other services. 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, 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 the 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 notable, but this is essentially a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The service provided is, in fact, liquidity, and ensuring these markets function well, while allowing anyone to build upon them,' Jung explained in an interview. Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders maintain ownership of their users and 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 needing to develop the backend or maintain liquidity. 'Builder codes enable integrators to focus on delivering a superior user experience, 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, the Ethereum-based wallet with over 100 million users worldwide, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module is a logical choice. Since October 2025, MetaMask has provided users with self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet. As a wallet, MetaMask benefits from streamlined fund transfers, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold, said 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.' MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond crypto, venturing into areas like commodities and equities, 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,' he said. 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 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 surprising to find a large centralized exchange handing over liquidity requirements to Hyperliquid's perps order book. However, taking the Hyperliquid route has proven beneficial for the South Africa-based 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. After initially offering customers spot market, spot margin, and then perpetuals, the team at VALR built all the infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, Ehsani said. Despite the effort, launching perpetual futures didn't yield the desired volume and liquidity. 'So, perpetual futures on our own books didn't take off as we had hoped, predominantly due to liquidity and volume concerns,' Ehsani said candidly in an interview. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't engage in wash trading or similar practices. We saw Hyperliquid bringing a huge amount of volume and market participants from all over the world together and thought, 'Why not plug into that?' 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 non-toxic flow, which is when more retail users are simply entering and exiting the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'