Hyperliquid Revolutionizes Crypto Perpetuals in DeFi's 'Money LEGO' Landscape

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is particularly relevant in the context of 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 alumni Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid has been live since the beginning of 2023. The platform is capitalizing on the depth and volume of its order book by offering a unique feature: composability. This concept, derived from decentralized finance (DeFi), enables permissionless smart contracts to interlock like 'money LEGOs,' forming the foundation of novel tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance, homegrown HyperCore blockchain. This allows other applications to build upon the platform's shared liquidity, rather than fragmenting it. In essence, applications such as wallets or even other exchanges can utilize Hyperliquid as a backend, providing perps trading and other services. As more developers integrate with Hyperliquid, the platform's liquidity deepens, and the variety of assets expands, resulting in a compounding network effect. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent 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. The platform has garnered significant praise from its growing user base. 'Hyperliquid is more than just a perpetuals exchange; it's akin to 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 aspect is impressive, but this is essentially a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The primary service offered is liquidity, and ensuring that all markets function optimally, allowing anyone to build upon them,' Jung explained in an interview. Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders maintain ownership of their users and have full control over the user interface, 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 the backend or maintain liquidity. 'Builder codes enable integrators to focus on delivering exceptional user experiences, 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 top-notch on-chain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure, earning fees on every trade.' For an application like MetaMask, which boasts over 100 million users worldwide, integrating with Hyperliquid's EVM module is a logical choice. 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 not requiring a decentralized app (dApp) connection, and fund transfers are streamlined, enabling users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold, according to 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 said. 'Matching orders is genuinely challenging, and Hyperliquid excels at it, so we don't attempt to rebuild it,' said Saint Olive via email. 'By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available anywhere.' MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond the crypto space, with commodities and equities becoming increasingly popular, according to Saint Olive. '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,' he said. In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, which is transparent and has no hidden spread or execution costs, allowing traders to verify exactly what they paid. 'We believe that transparency is a significant advantage, and we're actively exploring more innovative pricing models, as 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, such as VALR, relying on Hyperliquid's perps order book for liquidity. However, taking the Hyperliquid route has proven to be a good option for the South Africa-based exchange, which is ranked among the largest 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. Initially, VALR built all the necessary infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, Ehsani said. Despite the effort, the team struggled to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity for their perpetual futures. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't engage in wash trading or similar practices. We saw Hyperliquid bringing a huge amount of volume and market participants from all over the world together and thought, 'Why not plug into that?' ' Ehsani said in an interview. 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. 'Imagine 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 purely entering and exiting the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'