What is Hyperliquid?

Hyperliquid is easiest to understand as an exchange that was built as a blockchain. Most crypto chains (Ethereum, Solana) are general-purpose computers, and exchanges are apps that run on them. Hyperliquid flipped that: its designers wrote a chain whose built-in job is to keep order books, check margin and run liquidations, and then added a general-purpose smart-contract layer next to it.

If you have used Binance or Coinbase Advanced, the trading screen will look familiar. The difference is underneath: there is no company database holding your balance. Your account is a wallet address, and every order you place is a transaction that independent validators agree on.

The numbers, as of 4 November 2026

All figures from the Hyperliquid info API at 07:27 UTC unless noted.

What	Value
Core perpetual markets	235 listed, 179 live
Core perps 24h volume	~$6.99B
Core perps open interest	~$10.7B
Builder-deployed (HIP-3) perps 24h volume	~$5.03B, 98% of it on trade.xyz
HIP-4 outcome contracts	278 outcomes in 25 questions
HYPE price (perp mark)	~$85.16
Active validators	27 (35 registered)
HYPE staked	~439M
Chain TVL (DefiLlama)	~$2.58B, 7th of all chains

Live versions of these numbers are on our data pages, and the markets list shows what you can trade.

What you can trade

• Crypto perpetual futures (“perps”). The core product. A perp is a contract that tracks a coin’s price with no expiry date, lets you go long or short, and lets you use leverage (up to 40x on BTC). See perpetual futures explained.
• Spot tokens. Buy and hold actual tokens such as HYPE, or bridged BTC, ETH and SOL, on onchain order books.
• Stocks, indices and commodities, as perps. Since HIP-3, outside teams can deploy their own perp markets. The biggest, trade.xyz, lists perps tracking the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, oil, gold, Nvidia, Tesla and more. These are synthetic contracts, not shares. See HIP-3.
• Outcome markets. Since HIP-4, fully collateralized yes/no contracts on things like “will BTC settle above $X tomorrow” or a sports result, with no leverage and no liquidations. See HIP-4 outcome markets.
• Vaults. Deposit into HLP, the community market-making vault, or follow other traders’ vaults. See HLP explained.

How it works, in one paragraph

Validators run a consensus protocol called HyperBFT that orders every transaction and finalizes each block in one step. The exchange engine, called HyperCore, processes those transactions: it matches orders by price and then time, updates margin, pays funding every hour and liquidates accounts that run out of margin. Prices for margin come from an oracle that blends prices from big centralized exchanges. Next to HyperCore sits the HyperEVM, an Ethereum-compatible smart-contract layer where lending apps, liquid staking and other DeFi live. The docs give a median order latency of 0.2 seconds and capacity of about 200,000 orders per second. The longer walkthrough follows one trade end to end.

Where the money goes

Trading fees are small (0.045% taker and 0.015% maker on perps at the entry tier) and, per Hyperliquid’s fee docs, they go to the community side of the system rather than to a company: HLP depositors, market deployers, and the Assistance Fund, which automatically converts fees into HYPE. Hyperliquid’s documentation describes that HYPE as burned. On 4 November 2026 the Assistance Fund address held about 48.65M HYPE (how buybacks work).

Why it matters to you

• You keep custody. Your funds sit in your own onchain account, not in a company’s omnibus wallet. Nobody can freeze your account on a whim, and nobody can lend out your deposit.
• Everything is public. Anyone can see every trade, position and liquidation. That’s good for fairness and bad for privacy: big traders are watched closely.
• Fees are low and transparent. You can compute exactly what you’ll pay. A referral code takes 4% off on your first $25M of volume.
• You are your own bank. Lose your wallet keys, sign a malicious transaction or send funds to the wrong network, and there is no support desk that can reverse it.

What can go wrong

Where to go next

New here? Read how to start trading on Hyperliquid, then deposit USDC. Want to understand the machine first? Start with HyperCore vs HyperEVM and how Hyperliquid compares to centralized exchanges.