Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals in DeFi's 'Money LEGO' Ecosystem

The old adage 'liquidity begets liquidity' holds true, and Hyperliquid has emerged as the go-to decentralized exchange for traders seeking to engage with perpetual futures, or 'perps', which are blockchain-based derivatives contracts that facilitate speculation on asset prices with leverage and no expiration date. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid has been live since the beginning of 2023 and is now capitalizing on the depth and volume of its order book by introducing a concept akin to composability, a key principle in decentralized finance (DeFi) that allows permissionless smart contracts to interlock like 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, rather than fragmenting it. This means that applications such as wallets or even other exchanges can leverage Hyperliquid as a backend, providing perps trading and other services without having to develop their own infrastructure. As more developers integrate with Hyperliquid, the platform's liquidity deepens, the range of assets expands, and network effects become more pronounced. 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', which has generated approximately $90 million in revenue, according to Flowscan. Hyperliquid has garnered a growing following of devotees who sing its praises. 'Hyperliquid is more than just a perpetuals exchange; it's akin to the AWS of finance,' said Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, the first US-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid's native token, HYPE. 'The perps aspect is impressive, but what we're really dealing with here is a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The service on offer is, in fact, liquidity, and ensuring that all these markets function seamlessly, while 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 handles the backend for liquidity and execution,' said Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs, via email. 'Integrators can offer their users best-in-class on-chain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure, while 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 makes perfect sense. Since October 2025, MetaMask has provided its users with self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet. As a wallet, MetaMask has the advantage of not requiring a decentralized app (dApp) to connect to, and fund transfers are streamlined, 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 anywhere.' According to Saint Olive, MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond crypto, with commodities and equities becoming increasingly popular. '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, which is 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 requirements. However, taking the Hyperliquid route has proven to be a good option for the South Africa-based exchange VALR, which is 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. Having initially offered 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 efforts that went into launching perpetual futures, Ehsani candidly admitted that it was challenging to achieve volume and liquidity. 'So, perpetual futures on our own books didn't take off as we had hoped they would, primarily due to liquidity and volume concerns,' Ehsani said in an interview. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't engage in wash trading or anything like that. 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, when the likes of Robinhood, Coinbase, Intercontinental Exchange, and others 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 simply entering and exiting the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'