Hyperliquid is taking crypto perps deep into DeFi’s ‘money LEGO’ land

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.

“Matching orders is genuinely hard, and Hyperliquid is excellent at it, so we don’t try to rebuild it,” said Saint Olive via email. “By routing orders straight to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available anywhere. ”

MetaMask said it’s seeing growth beyond crypto towards things like commodities and equities, according to Saint Olive. “Real-world-asset markets have gone from a small slice of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today,” he said.

When it comes to fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, disclosed up front, with no hidden spread and nothing buried in execution, so a trader can verify exactly what they paid. “We think that transparency is the real advantage, and we’re actively exploring more innovative pricing models, because 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 handing over liquidity requirements to Hyperliquid’s perps order book. But taking the Hyperliquid route has proved a good option for South Africa-based exchange VALR, ranked among the largest exchanges 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.

Having started out offering customers spot market, spot margin, and then perpetuals, the team at VALR built all the infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, Ehsani said. Despite all the hard work that went into launching perpetual futures, Ehsani said candidly that it was difficult to get volume and liquidity.

“So perpetual futures on our own books didn’t take off as we had hoped they would, predominantly because of the liquidity and volume,” Ehsani said in an interview. “Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don’t do any wash trading or anything like that. We saw Hyperliquid bringing a huge amount of volume and market participants from all over the world together and thought, ‘Why don’t we plug into that?’”

Looking ahead, when the likes of Robinhood, Coinbase, Intercontinental Exchange and others go full throttle into offering perps, there will be opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage, according to Jung of Hyperion.

“Say you are 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 just purely entering and exiting the market, you’ll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.”