Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Composability and Shared Liquidity

The concept that liquidity attracts liquidity is a fundamental principle in the world of finance. Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange, has gained popularity among traders, especially those interested in perpetual futures or 'perps,' which are blockchain-based derivatives contracts allowing 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 is now capitalizing on its order book's volume and depth by providing firms with a unique offering: composability. This DeFi concept enables permissionless smart contracts to interlock like financial building blocks, creating new tokenized products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to tap into the platform's shared liquidity instead of fragmenting it. This means that applications like wallets or 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 intensify. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and the South African exchange VALR, are using Hyperliquid's 'builder codes' system, 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, the first U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid's native token HYPE. 'While the perps aspect is impressive, this is essentially a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The primary service offered is liquidity, ensuring seamless market operation and allowing anyone to build on top of it,' Jung explained in an interview. Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders maintain control over their users and 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 exceptional user experiences, while Hyperliquid handles 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 makes sense. Since October 2025, MetaMask has provided 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 wallet plugs into MetaMask's money account, social login, and follow trading, leaving Hyperliquid to handle 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 via email. 'By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available.' MetaMask is witnessing growth beyond the crypto space, 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. Regarding fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, disclosed upfront, with no hidden spread and nothing buried in execution, 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 surprising to see a large centralized exchange, like South Africa-based VALR, rely on Hyperliquid's perps order book for liquidity. However, taking the Hyperliquid route has proven beneficial for VALR, one of Africa's largest exchanges, 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 its infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, but struggled to achieve volume and liquidity for perpetual futures, Ehsani said. '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?'' 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.'