Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals with DeFi's Modular Finance

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is being put to the test by Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained popularity among traders, particularly 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 its order book's volume and depth by offering firms a unique concept: composability. This DeFi concept involves permissionless smart contracts that 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, allowing other applications to build upon the platform's shared liquidity without fragmenting it. This means that applications such as wallets or even other exchanges can utilize Hyperliquid as a backend 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 compound. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and South African exchange VALR, are using Hyperliquid's 'builder codes,' which have generated approximately $90 million in revenue, according to Flowscan. The platform has garnered significant praise from its growing user base. 'Hyperliquid is not just a perpetuals exchange; it's more like the AWS for finance,' said Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, the first U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid's native token, HYPE. '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,' Jung explained in an interview. Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders on Hyperliquid own their users and have full control over the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators can charge fees on the notional size of their users' trades without developing the backend or maintaining liquidity. 'Builder codes let integrators focus on what they do best – delivering a great user experience – while Hyperliquid serves as 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, and earn fees on every trade.' For an app like MetaMask, the Ethereum-based wallet with over 100 million users worldwide, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module makes perfect sense. MetaMask has been providing its users with self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet since October 2025. As a wallet, MetaMask has the advantage of not requiring a decentralized app (dApp) connection, 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 hard, and Hyperliquid is excellent at it, so we don't try to rebuild it,' said Saint Olive via email. '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 commodities and equities becoming increasingly popular, according to Saint Olive. '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,' 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 think that transparency is the real advantage, and we're actively exploring more innovative pricing models, because 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 handing over liquidity requirements to Hyperliquid's perps order book. However, taking the Hyperliquid route has proven to be a good option for 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 started out offering 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 hard work that went into launching perpetual futures, Ehsani candidly admitted that it was difficult to get volume and liquidity. 'So perpetual futures on our own books didn't take off as we had hoped they would, predominantly because of the liquidity and volume,' Ehsani said in an interview. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't do any 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 go full throttle into offering perps, there will be opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage, according to Jung of Hyperion. 'Say you are 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 just purely entering and exiting the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'