Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals in DeFi's Financial Building Blocks

The concept that liquidity generates more liquidity is being exemplified by Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has become a top choice for traders of perpetual futures, or 'perps.' These blockchain-based derivatives contracts allow users to speculate on asset prices with leverage and no expiration date. Founded by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and iliensinc, Hyperliquid launched in 2023, capitalizing on the volume and depth of its order book by introducing a concept akin to composability from decentralized finance (DeFi). This concept involves permissionless smart contracts that can interlock like building blocks of financial products, known as 'money LEGOs.' Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM connects directly to its high-speed HyperCore blockchain. This allows other applications to utilize the platform's shared liquidity without fragmenting it, essentially enabling them to piggyback on Hyperliquid as a backend for services like perps trading. As more developers integrate with Hyperliquid, the platform experiences deepening liquidity, expansion of assets, and compounding network effects. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes,' generating around $90 million in revenue, according to Flowscan. The platform has garnered significant praise from its growing user base. Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, describes Hyperliquid as 'the AWS for finance,' emphasizing its role as a layer-one blockchain infrastructure providing liquidity and execution, rather than just a perpetuals exchange. Similar to AWS, builders on Hyperliquid own their users, control the user interface, and charge fees based on the notional size of their users' trades without needing to develop or maintain the backend or liquidity. 'Builder codes allow integrators to focus on delivering great user experiences while Hyperliquid handles the backend for liquidity and execution,' said Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs. 'Integrators can offer best-in-class on-chain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure to their users and earn fees on every trade.' For applications like MetaMask, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module makes 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 streamlined fund transfers, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they hold. It plugs into MetaMask's money account, social login, and follow trading, leaving Hyperliquid to handle matching, the oracle, and the margin engine, according to Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. 'Matching orders is genuinely challenging, and Hyperliquid excels at it, so we don't attempt to rebuild it,' said Saint Olive. 'By directly routing orders to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available.' MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond crypto into areas like commodities and equities, with real-world-asset markets increasing from a small fraction of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today, according to Saint Olive. In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee with no hidden spread, allowing traders to verify exactly what they paid. The company values transparency and is exploring innovative pricing models to make economics a reason people choose MetaMask, not a source of friction. It's notable that a large centralized exchange like VALR has opted to use Hyperliquid's perps order book for liquidity. Despite building in-house infrastructure for spot markets, spot margin, and perpetuals, including risk and liquidation engines, the team at VALR found it challenging to achieve volume and liquidity for perpetual futures. 'Our volume is genuine; we don't engage in wash trading or similar practices. We saw Hyperliquid bringing together a huge amount of volume and market participants from around the world and decided to plug into that,' said Farzam Ehsani, CEO and co-founder of VALR. Looking ahead, as 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 and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid,' Jung said. 'With a lot of non-toxic flow from retail users entering and exiting the market, you'll see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'