Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Composable Liquidity

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity has become a guiding principle for Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained significant traction among traders, particularly those interested in perpetual futures, also known as 'perps'. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and the pseudonymous developer iliensinc, Hyperliquid has been live since early 2023, capitalizing on the depth and volume of its order book to offer a unique value proposition to firms: composability. This DeFi concept allows permissionless smart contracts to interlock seamlessly, much like financial building blocks, enabling the creation of novel tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance, homegrown HyperCore blockchain. This setup allows other applications to leverage the platform's shared liquidity without fragmenting it, essentially enabling them to piggyback on Hyperliquid's capabilities 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 notable names like MetaMask and Phantom wallet, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', generating approximately $90 million in revenue, according to Flowscan. The platform has garnered significant praise from its users, with Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, likening it to 'the AWS for finance'. Jung emphasizes that Hyperliquid is more than just a perpetuals exchange; it's a layer-one blockchain infrastructure that provides liquidity and execution, allowing builders to focus on delivering exceptional user experiences. Similar to AWS, builders maintain full control over their users and user interfaces, 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 needing to develop or maintain the backend infrastructure or liquidity. For applications like MetaMask, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module is a strategic move. MetaMask has enabled its users to access perps directly from their wallets since October 2025, streamlining fund transfers and allowing users to trade with the tokens they already hold. Being a wallet provides MetaMask with the advantage of not requiring a separate dApp connection, while Hyperliquid handles order matching, oracles, and margin engines. Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask, notes that matching orders is a complex task that Hyperliquid excels at, and therefore, they don't attempt to rebuild it. By routing orders directly to Hyperliquid's order book, MetaMask Perps offers exceptional liquidity and execution quality. MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond the crypto space, with commodities and equities becoming increasingly popular, according to Saint Olive. The company charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, prioritizing transparency and exploring innovative pricing models to enhance user experience. The decision by VALR, a large centralized exchange in Africa, to utilize Hyperliquid's perps order book for liquidity requirements may come as a surprise. However, this move has proven beneficial for VALR, which had previously struggled to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity for its perpetual futures offerings. Looking ahead, as major players like Robinhood and Coinbase expand their perps offerings, opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage will emerge, according to Jung. This will enable users to maintain positions on multiple platforms, such as Robinhood and Hyperliquid, and capitalize on the resulting non-toxic flow to generate organic funding rates.