Hyperliquid is a vertically integrated Layer-1 blockchain built primarily for on-chain financial markets.
Its flagship product is a decentralized exchange offering perpetual futures and spot trading through a fully on-chain central-limit order book. Hyperliquid’s DEX supports spot and perpetual-futures trading across cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH….), equities (NVDA, AAPL…), commodities (GOLD, SILVER….), foreign-exchange pairs, market indices (SP500, Nasdaq…) and other permissionlessly listed assets.
The network has two connected execution environments:
HyperCore: trading, order books, liquidations, staking and native assets.
HyperEVM: an Ethereum-compatible smart-contract environment secured by the same HyperBFT validator set.
Hyperliquid combines centralized-exchange-style speed with self-custody and public settlement. Its approximately $8.31 billion in daily perpetual-futures volume substantially exceeds older decentralized competitors such as GMX and dYdX.
Business Model
Hyperliquid earns protocol fees from perpetual-futures and spot trading. Base perpetual fees are 0.015% for makers and 0.045% for takers, with lower rates for high-volume traders and HYPE stakers.
Unlike a conventional exchange, fees do not primarily become corporate profit for Hyperliquid Labs. They are directed to community-aligned destinations:
Assistance Fund: Uses fee revenue to purchase HYPE automatically; acquired tokens are permanently burned.
Hyperliquidity Provider: The community-owned HLP vault receives part of the fees while conducting market-making, liquidations and other liquidity strategies.
Market deployers: Builders launching spot or HIP-3 perpetual markets can receive a share of the fees generated by their markets.
Maker and referral incentives: Portions of fees support rebates, discounts and referral rewards.
Additional monetization sources include asset-deployment auctions, network fees and builder fees. Third-party applications can add builder fees of up to 0.10% on perpetual trades and 1.00% on spot trades.
HyperEVM generates gas fees, but both base and priority fees are burned. This means increased network activity can benefit HYPE through supply reduction rather than producing conventional corporate income.
The business model can be summarized as: trading activity produces fees; fees support liquidity providers and builders, purchase and burn HYPE, and reinforce the network’s liquidity and token utility.
Funding payments are not protocol revenue—they are transferred directly between long and short traders. Hyperliquid fee documentation
Financials
Protocol-level figures as of September 2026; values fluctuate with trading activity.
Financial Metric
Reported Amount
Fees — 24 hours
$2.83M
Protocol revenue — 24 hours
$2.21M
Fees — 7 days
$15.11M
Protocol revenue — 7 days
$11.67M
Fees — 30 days
$82.32M
Protocol revenue — 30 days
$64.42M
Annualized protocol earnings
$698.32M
Cumulative fees
$1.56B
Cumulative protocol revenue
$1.26B
Approximately 78% of gross fees became protocol revenue during the reported 30-day period.
The most recent 30-day fee total implies an annualized gross-fee run rate of approximately $1.00 billion, although actual results can vary materially with market volatility and trading volume.
Hyperliquid’s cost structure is potentially attractive because the protocol operates with a relatively small contributor team and does not rely on large token-incentive payments to generate reported volume.
Financial performance is highly sensitive to crypto trading activity. Lower volatility, declining market share or tighter regulatory restrictions could reduce volume and fee revenue.
These figures represent on-chain protocol economics, not audited financial statements for Hyperliquid Labs or the Hyper Foundation. Neither entity publishes conventional income statements, operating expenses, cash flow or net profit, so protocol revenue should not be treated as corporate earnings.
Performance Metrics Against Competitors
Metric
Hyperliquid
GMX
dYdX
Total Value Locked
$6.72B
$210M
$109M
Daily Perpetual Trading Volume
$8.31B
$27.6M
$13.0M
Number of Liquidity Pools
No AMM pools; 1 flagship HLP vault, plus user vaults
2 GLV vaults plus multiple market-specific GM pools
No AMM pools; 1 MegaVault
Average Slippage
Not published; varies by market, order size and live order-book depth
Not published; determined by pool balance and price impact
Not published; varies by market, order size and order-book depth
Trading Fees
Perps: 0.015% maker / 0.045% taker at base tier
0.04%–0.06% per position increase or decrease
Approximately 0.01% maker / 0.05% taker at entry tier
Yield for Liquidity Providers
HLP: approximately 5.8% APR
Representative pools: approximately 7%–8% fee APY
MegaVault APR is variable and based on trailing 30-day performance
Hyperliquid’s lead is clearest in trading activity: its reported daily perpetual volume was roughly 300 times GMX’s and 638 times dYdX’s in this snapshot.
TVL definitions are not perfectly comparable: Hyperliquid’s combined figure includes its bridge, HLP, spot-order-book and perpetual products.
“Average slippage” is not reported consistently by these protocols and should be measured for a defined asset and order size rather than represented by a potentially misleading platform-wide number.
HyperEVM: EVM-compatible environment; mainnet chain ID 999, with HYPE used for gas.
Native USDC bridge: Connects Hyperliquid with Arbitrum.
Additional deposit rails: Selected assets can be deposited from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Monad and Plasma. These are onboarding routes, not separate Hyperliquid deployments.
Hyperliquid is therefore best described as a single sovereign blockchain with multichain deposit connectivity, rather than a multichain DEX.
Tokenomics
Maximum/genesis supply:1,000,000,000 HYPE
Current reported total supply:998,925,992 HYPE
Current circulating supply:298,814,625 HYPE, or 29.88% of maximum supply, according to Hyperliquid’s public API. Third-party market-data providers use different circulation classifications, so their figures may be lower.
Future-emissions and community-rewards allocation:388,880,000 HYPE, representing 38.888% of genesis supply.
Emission rate: There is no fixed annual issuance rate. Staking emissions decline as total stake increases; the protocol’s reference rate is approximately 2.37% annually at 400 million HYPE staked, equivalent to approximately 9.48 million HYPE per year before validator commissions.
Initial allocation:
31.000% — Genesis community distribution
38.888% — Future emissions and community rewards
23.800% — Current and future core contributors
6.000% — Hyper Foundation budget
0.300% — Community grants
0.012% — HIP-2 liquidity
Token utility: HYPE secures the network through staking, pays HyperEVM gas, provides trading-fee discounts, supports governance and validator participation, and is required as stake for certain permissionless market deployments.
Trading fees routed to the Assistance Fund are automatically converted into HYPE and burned, while HyperEVM base and priority fees are also burned.
Main Investors
Investor
Allocated HYPE Holdings
Percentage of Total Supply
External venture-capital investors
0 HYPE
0%
Private-sale or seed investors
0 HYPE
0%
Hyperliquid was self-funded and did not conduct seed, venture-capital or private-token financing rounds.
Consequently, there is no disclosed VC allocation or investor-unlock schedule.
The 238 million HYPE contributor allocation belongs to current and future core contributors; it should not be characterized as an investor allocation.
Institutions that later purchased HYPE on the open market are token holders, not original investors in Hyperliquid, and their positions can change without notice.
Founders and History
Hyperliquid was founded in 2022 by Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous Harvard classmate known as iliensinc.
Yan studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, worked as a quantitative trader at Hudson River Trading and later founded the crypto market-making firm Chameleon Trading.
The project emerged following the failures of centralized crypto platforms in 2022, with the goal of creating a fast, transparent and self-custodial trading venue.
The exchange entered closed alpha in early 2023 and launched publicly later that year.
Native spot trading arrived in 2024 through HIP-1 and HIP-2.
The HYPE genesis event took place on November 29, 2024, distributing approximately 31% of supply to eligible community members.
HyperEVM launched on mainnet in February 2025, expanding Hyperliquid from a derivatives exchange into a general-purpose financial blockchain.
Its history is notable for product-led growth, a small technical team and the decision to remain independent of venture funding.
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