Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals in DeFi's Thriving Ecosystem

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is particularly relevant in the context of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained popularity among traders, especially those interested in perpetual futures or 'perps'. Founded by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and iliensinc, a pseudonymous developer, Hyperliquid has been live since early 2023 and is now capitalizing on the depth and volume of its order book by providing firms with the ability to compose with its shared liquidity. This concept, borrowed from DeFi, allows permissionless smart contracts to interlock seamlessly, much like money LEGO blocks, forming the foundation of novel tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-speed, homegrown HyperCore blockchain, allowing 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, enabling them to offer 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 South African exchange VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', generating approximately $90 million in revenue, according to Flowscan. Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, praises the platform, stating, 'Hyperliquid is not just a perpetuals exchange; it's more like the AWS for finance.' Jung emphasizes that the platform provides liquidity and having all markets work well, allowing anyone to build on top of them. Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders own their users and have full control over the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators charge fees based on the notional size of their users' trades without needing to develop the backend or maintain liquidity. According to Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs, 'Builder codes enable integrators to focus on delivering a great user experience, while Hyperliquid serves as the backend for liquidity and execution.' For an app like MetaMask, which reports over 100 million users worldwide, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module makes perfect sense. Since October 2025, MetaMask has provided its users with self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet. Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask, notes that being a wallet has the advantage of streamlining fund transfers, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold. MetaMask plugs into Hyperliquid's money account, social login, and follow trading, leaving Hyperliquid to handle matching, the oracle, and the margin engine. Saint Olive praises Hyperliquid's order-matching capabilities, stating, 'Matching orders is genuinely hard, and Hyperliquid is excellent at it, so we don't try to rebuild it.' By routing orders directly 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 increasing from a small slice of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today. The company charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, with no hidden spread and full transparency. Even large centralized exchanges, like South Africa-based VALR, are handing over liquidity requirements to Hyperliquid's perps order book. Despite initially building all infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, the team at VALR found it challenging to achieve volume and liquidity. According to 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, as major players like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Intercontinental Exchange expand their perps offerings, opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage will emerge, according to Jung. 'Say you are maintaining one position on Robinhood, for example, and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid,' Jung explains. 'Then, because you have a lot of 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.'