Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Shared Liquidity and Composability

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is being put into practice by Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained popularity among traders, particularly those interested in perpetual futures or 'perps'. Launched in 2023 by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and iliensinc, Hyperliquid has capitalized on the volume and depth of its order book by introducing a concept akin to composability, where permissionless smart contracts can be combined like building blocks, creating new tokenized financial products. The platform's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to utilize Hyperliquid's shared liquidity without fragmenting it. This enables applications such as wallets or exchanges to leverage 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. Hundreds of developers, including prominent names like MetaMask and VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', generating over $90 million in revenue. Hyperliquid is being praised by its growing user base for its innovative approach to DeFi. 'Hyperliquid is not just a perpetuals exchange; it's more like the AWS for finance,' said Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi. 'The perps part is great, but this is really a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The service on offer is actually liquidity, and having all these markets work well, and allowing anyone to build things on top of them.' Similar to AWS, builders own their users and control the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators charge fees on the notional size of their users' trades without developing the backend or maintaining liquidity. For apps like MetaMask, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module makes sense. MetaMask has given its users self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet since October 2025. As a wallet, MetaMask has the advantage of streamlined fund transfers, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold. Hyperliquid handles matching, the oracle, and the margin engine, while MetaMask focuses on delivering a great user experience. 'Hyperliquid is excellent at matching orders, so we don't try to rebuild it,' said Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. 'By routing orders straight to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available anywhere.' MetaMask is seeing growth beyond crypto, with real-world-asset markets now accounting for roughly a quarter of perp volume. The company charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, with no hidden spread and nothing buried in execution. Even large centralized exchanges like VALR are leveraging Hyperliquid's perps order book for liquidity. Despite initially building their own infrastructure, VALR found it challenging to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't do any wash trading or anything like that,' said Farzam Ehsani, CEO and co-founder of VALR. 'We saw Hyperliquid bringing a huge amount of volume and market participants from all over the world together and thought, 'Why don't we plug into that?'' Looking ahead, the emergence of cross-venue arbitrage opportunities is expected as more players enter the perps market. 'Say you are maintaining one position on Robinhood, for example, and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid,' said Jung. 'Then, because you have a lot of non-toxic flow, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'