Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals with DeFi's Modular Approach

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is particularly relevant for Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained popularity among traders, especially those interested in 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 a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid launched in 2023 and has been capitalizing on the volume and depth of its order book. The platform offers a concept akin to composability, a DeFi concept where permissionless smart contracts can be combined like building blocks, creating new tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-speed, homegrown HyperCore blockchain. This allows other applications to build upon the platform's shared liquidity, rather than fragmenting it. As a result, applications like wallets or other exchanges can utilize Hyperliquid as a backend to offer perps trading and other services. The more builders deploy and integrate with Hyperliquid, the deeper the liquidity, the broader the variety of assets, and the more pronounced the network effects. Currently, hundreds of developers, including notable names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and the South African exchange VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes.' These builders have generated 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 highlights that the platform provides liquidity and having all these markets work well, allowing anyone to build on top of them. Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders own their users and fully control 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 developing the backend or maintaining liquidity. For an app like MetaMask, which reports over 100 million users worldwide, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module makes sense. Since October 2025, MetaMask has given its users self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet. Being a wallet has advantages, such as 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 the user experience. MetaMask is seeing growth beyond crypto, towards commodities and equities. 'Real-world-asset markets have gone from a small slice of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today,' said Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, with no hidden spread and full transparency. The platform 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 handed over liquidity requirements to Hyperliquid's perps order book. Despite initially building all the infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, the team at VALR found it challenging to achieve volume and liquidity for perpetual futures. 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. 'Say you are maintaining one position on Robinhood 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 just purely entering and exiting the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'