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

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'. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid has capitalized on the depth and volume of its order book by introducing a concept similar to composability, where permissionless smart contracts can be combined like financial building blocks, allowing for the creation of new tokenized products. The platform's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance HyperCore blockchain, enabling other applications to utilize Hyperliquid's shared liquidity without fragmenting it. This means that applications such as wallets or even other exchanges can integrate with Hyperliquid, using it 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 intensify. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', generating 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 AWS for finance,' said Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, a U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid's native token HYPE. 'While the perps aspect is impressive, Hyperliquid is essentially a layer-one blockchain infrastructure providing liquidity and execution services, allowing anyone to build on top of it,' Jung explained in an interview. Similar to AWS, builders using Hyperliquid own 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 having to develop the backend or maintain liquidity. 'Builder codes enable integrators to focus on delivering a superior user experience, while Hyperliquid handles the backend for liquidity and execution,' said Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs. '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 makes perfect sense. 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 connection, and fund transfers are streamlined, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold, according to Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. The integration enables MetaMask to plug into its money account, social login, and follow trading, while Hyperliquid handles matching, the oracle, and the margin engine. 'Matching orders is genuinely challenging, and Hyperliquid excels at it, so we don't attempt to rebuild it,' said Saint Olive. '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 crypto, with commodities and equities becoming increasingly popular, according to Saint Olive. 'Real-world-asset markets have grown 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, disclosed upfront, with no hidden spread or execution costs, allowing traders to verify exactly what they paid. 'We believe 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, ranked among the largest in Africa with close to two million retail customers and approximately 2,000 corporate institutional customers, according to 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 perpetual futures. 'Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don't engage in wash trading or similar practices,' Ehsani said in an interview. '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?' 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. 'With a significant amount of non-toxic flow, which occurs when retail users enter and exit the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.'