Hyperliquid Revolutionizes DeFi with Composable Liquidity

The concept that liquidity breeds liquidity is being put into practice by Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that has gained popularity among traders, particularly those interested in perpetual futures or 'perps'. Founded by Harvard alumni Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid has been live since the beginning of 2023 and is now capitalizing on the depth and volume of its order book by offering a unique concept: composability. This DeFi concept allows permissionless smart contracts to seamlessly integrate, much like LEGO blocks, to create new tokenized financial products. Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM is directly connected to its high-performance HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to build upon the platform's shared liquidity without fragmenting it. In essence, applications such as wallets or even 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 multiply. Currently, hundreds of developers, including prominent names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and South African exchange VALR, are utilizing Hyperliquid's 'builder codes', generating approximately $90 million in revenue according to Flowscan. Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, praises the platform, stating that 'Hyperliquid is not just a perpetuals exchange, it's more like the AWS for finance'. Jung highlights that the platform provides a layer-one blockchain infrastructure, offering liquidity and allowing builders to create on top of it. Similar to AWS, builders own their users and have full control over the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators can charge fees on the notional size of their users' trades without developing the backend or maintaining liquidity. For instance, MetaMask, an Ethereum-based wallet with over 100 million users worldwide, has integrated with Hyperliquid's EVM module, allowing users to access perps directly from the wallet since October 2025. This integration enables streamlined fund transfers, allowing users to trade directly with the tokens they already hold. Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask, notes that Hyperliquid handles matching, the oracle, and the margin engine, while MetaMask focuses on delivering a great user experience. 'Matching orders is genuinely hard, and Hyperliquid is excellent at it, so we don't try to rebuild it', Saint Olive says. By routing orders directly to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available. MetaMask is seeing growth beyond crypto, with real-world-asset markets now accounting for roughly a quarter of perp volume. In terms of fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, with no hidden spread and nothing buried in execution, allowing traders to verify exactly what they paid. The company is exploring innovative pricing models to make its economics a reason people choose MetaMask, not a source of friction. Even large centralized exchanges, such as South Africa-based exchange VALR, are handing over liquidity requirements to Hyperliquid's perps order book. Despite initially building all the infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, the team at VALR found it challenging to achieve sufficient volume and liquidity for their perpetual futures. According to Farzam Ehsani, CEO and co-founder of VALR, the exchange has seen improved results since integrating with Hyperliquid. Looking ahead, when major players like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Intercontinental Exchange enter the perps market, there will be opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage, according to Jung. This will enable users to maintain positions on multiple platforms, such as Robinhood and Hyperliquid, and take advantage of non-toxic flow to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.