Liquidity begets liquidity, so the saying goes.
Hyperliquid, as its name suggests, has become the decentralized exchange of choice for many traders, particularly those who want to trade perpetual futures or “perps,” blockchain-based derivatives contracts that allow users to speculate on the price of an asset with leverage and no expiration date.
Created by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid, which went live at the start of 2023, is capitalizing on its volume and depth of order book by offering firms something akin to composibility: the concept from decentralized finance (DeFi), whereby permissionless smart contracts can slot together like money LEGOs, the building blocks of new tokenized financial products.
Hyperliquid’s Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM connects directly to its super-fast homegrown HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to compose atop the platform’s shared liquidity rather than fragmenting it. In other words, applications like wallets or even other exchanges can piggyback on Hyperliquid, using it as a backend to offer perps trading and other services.
As more builders deploy on and integrate Hyperliquid, liquidity deepens, the variety of assets expands, and network effects compound. There are now hundreds of developers — including big names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet and South African exchange VALR — using Hyperliquid’s system of “builder codes.” Builders have generated some $90 million in revenue so far, according to Flowscan.
A growing army of acolytes can’t praise the platform enough.
“Hyperliquid is not just a perpetuals exchange, it’s more like 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 part is great, but this is really a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The service on offer is actually liquidity, and having all these markets work well, and allowing anyone to build things on top of them,” Jung said in an interview.
Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders own their users and fully control the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators charge fees on the notional size of their users’ trades without developing the backend or maintaining liquidity.
“Builder codes let integrators focus on what they do best, delivering a great user experience, 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 best-in-class onchain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure, and earn fees on every trade.”
For an app like MetaMask, the Ethereum-based wallet that reports over 100 million users worldwide, it makes perfect sense to fuse with Hyperliquid’s EVM module. MetaMask has given its users self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet since October of 2025.
Being a wallet has the advantage that there’s no decentralized app (dApp) to connect to, while fund transfers are streamlined to the point where users can trade directly with the tokens they already hold, said Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. It plugs into MetaMask’s money account, social login, and follow trading and leaves Hyperliquid to handle matching, the oracle, and the margin engine, he said.
Source
This article is syndicated for educational reading. For the latest updates, visit the original publisher.
Read on coindesk.com
