Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Seamless Perpetual Futures Trading

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is being taken to new heights by Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has quickly become the go-to platform for traders seeking to engage with perpetual futures, also known as 'perps'. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and the pseudonymous developer iliensinc, Hyperliquid has been live since the beginning of 2023 and is now harnessing the power of its extensive order book to offer a unique value proposition to firms: the ability to compose with its shared liquidity, rather than fragmenting it. This approach, reminiscent of the concept of composability in decentralized finance (DeFi), allows permissionless smart contracts to interlock seamlessly, giving rise to novel tokenized financial products. The HyperEVM, Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible platform, connects directly to its high-performance HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to build upon the platform's shared liquidity. This means that wallets, exchanges, and other services can leverage Hyperliquid as a backend, enabling them to offer perps trading and other features 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 multiply. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent names such as MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and the South African exchange VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', which have generated approximately $90 million in revenue to date. The platform has garnered significant praise from its growing user base. 'Hyperliquid is more than just a perpetuals exchange; it's akin to AWS for finance,' said Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, a U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid's native token HYPE. 'The perps aspect is just one part of the equation; this is a layer-one blockchain infrastructure that provides liquidity and execution, allowing anyone to build on top of it.' Similar to AWS, which provides cloud infrastructure, builders on Hyperliquid own their users and have full control over the user interface, while Hyperliquid handles the underlying liquidity and execution. Integrators who utilize builder codes can charge fees based on the notional size of their users' trades without having to develop or maintain their own backend infrastructure. 'Builder codes enable integrators to focus on delivering a superior user experience, while Hyperliquid provides the necessary liquidity and execution,' said Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs. 'This allows integrators to offer their users best-in-class on-chain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure, while earning fees on every trade.' For a wallet like MetaMask, which boasts over 100 million users worldwide, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module is a natural fit. Since October 2025, MetaMask has enabled its users to access perps directly from the wallet. As a wallet, MetaMask has the advantage of not requiring a separate decentralized app (dApp) to connect to, and fund transfers are streamlined, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold. Hyperliquid handles the matching, oracle, and margin engine, freeing up MetaMask to focus on its core competencies. 'Matching orders is a complex task, and Hyperliquid excels at it, so we don't attempt to replicate it,' said Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. 'By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available in the market.' According to Saint Olive, MetaMask is witnessing growth in areas beyond crypto, such as commodities and equities. 'Real-world-asset markets have expanded from a small fraction of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today.' In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, which is transparent and disclosed upfront, with no hidden spread or execution costs. 'We believe that transparency is a key advantage, and we're actively exploring innovative pricing models to ensure that our economics are a reason users choose MetaMask, not a source of friction,' Saint Olive added. It's notable that a large centralized exchange like VALR has opted to leverage Hyperliquid's perps order book for its liquidity requirements. However, this decision has proven to be a savvy move for the South Africa-based exchange, which is ranked among the largest in Africa with close to two million retail customers and approximately 2,000 corporate institutional customers. After initially building its own infrastructure, including risk and liquidation engines, VALR's team found it challenging to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity for its perpetual futures offerings. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't engage in wash trading or other practices,' said Farzam Ehsani, CEO and co-founder of VALR. 'We recognized that Hyperliquid was bringing a substantial amount of volume and market participants together and decided to plug into that.' Looking ahead, as major players like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Intercontinental Exchange expand their perps offerings, opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage will emerge, according to Jung. 'For instance, if you maintain one position on Robinhood and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid, you'll be able to capitalize on non-toxic flow, which is when retail users are simply entering and exiting the market, and witness more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'