Hyperliquid is capitalizing on the volume and depth of its order book by giving firms the option to compose with the platform’s shared liquidity, rather than fragmenting it.

By Ian Allison|Edited by Cheyenne Ligon

Jul 28, 2026, 10:49 am EDT

Liquidity begets liquidity, so the saying goes.

Hyperliquid is a popular decentralized exchange, especially among traders interested in perpetual futures – often called ‘perps’. These are blockchain-based contracts that let people trade assets with borrowed funds (leverage) without needing to worry about an expiry date.

Hyperliquid’s HyperEVM, which works with Ethereum, is directly linked to its incredibly fast HyperCore blockchain. This allows different applications to build on top of Hyperliquid’s combined liquidity instead of spreading it out. Essentially, apps like wallets or exchanges can use Hyperliquid as a foundation to offer perpetual futures trading and other features.

With more builders joining and connecting to Hyperliquid, the platform is seeing increased liquidity, a wider range of available assets, and growing network benefits. Hundreds of developers, including well-known companies like MetaMask, Phantom wallet, and VALR exchange, are now using Hyperliquid’s builder codes. These builders have collectively earned around $90 million in revenue, according to data from Flowscan.

A growing army of acolytes can’t praise the platform enough.

As an investor, I’m really excited about Hyperliquid. It’s not just another place to trade perpetual futures; according to Hansu Jian, the CEO of Hyperion DeFi – a U.S.-listed company investing in their token, HYPE – it’s building something much bigger. He compares it to Amazon Web Services, but for the financial world, suggesting it could become core infrastructure for all sorts of decentralized finance applications.

Jian explained that while the initial focus might seem like identifying wrongdoers, this technology is fundamentally a foundational blockchain infrastructure. Its core service is providing liquidity – ensuring smooth functioning markets and enabling anyone to develop applications on top of it.

As a crypto investor, I’m seeing some interesting parallels to how AWS works with cloud infrastructure. Basically, developers get to directly own the relationship with their users and fully customize the experience. Hyperliquid handles all the complex stuff behind the scenes – providing the liquidity and actually executing the trades. This means builders can focus on creating great user interfaces and earning fees based on their users’ trading volume, without needing to build or manage any of the backend infrastructure themselves. It’s a pretty neat setup.

According to Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs, their “Builder codes” allow developers to concentrate on creating excellent user experiences. Hyperliquid handles the technical aspects of providing liquidity and completing trades. This enables developers to offer users top-tier on-chain liquidity with reliable infrastructure, and generate revenue from each transaction.

Considering MetaMask, the popular Ethereum wallet used by over 100 million people globally, integrating with Hyperliquid’s technology is a logical step. MetaMask has already allowed its users to trade perpetual futures contracts directly within the wallet since October 2025, giving them full control of their funds.

According to Matthieu Saint Olive, a Product Manager at MetaMask, using a wallet simplifies things because you don’t need to connect to any decentralized apps. It also makes sending funds easier, allowing users to trade directly with their existing tokens. The wallet connects to your MetaMask account, social logins, and trading features, while Hyperliquid manages the technical aspects like trade matching, data feeds, and margin calculations.

It’s incredibly difficult to create a system for efficiently matching buy and sell orders, and Hyperliquid does it exceptionally well. That’s why we decided not to build our own,” explained Saint Olive in an email. “Instead, by directly connecting to Hyperliquid’s order book, MetaMask Perps can offer users excellent liquidity and fast, reliable trade execution.

According to Saint Olive, MetaMask is expanding beyond just cryptocurrency and is now seeing growth in areas like traditional commodities and stocks. He noted that trading in assets like these – often called ‘real-world assets’ – has significantly increased, going from a small portion of trading volume at the beginning of 2026 to around 25% today.

MetaMask has a simple fee structure: a flat 0.1% fee that’s clearly shown upfront. There are no hidden costs or extra charges added during transactions, so users always know exactly what they’re paying. According to Saint Olive, MetaMask believes transparency is key and is looking into even better pricing options to make cost a positive reason for choosing their platform, rather than a drawback.

It’s unusual to see a major cryptocurrency exchange rely on Hyperliquid’s platform for handling trades. However, VALR, a large African exchange with nearly two million individual and around two thousand business clients, has found it to be a beneficial strategy, according to its CEO and co-founder, Farzam Ehsani.

VALR initially provided customers with spot trading, spot margin, and perpetual contracts. According to Ehsani, they developed all the necessary systems themselves, including those for managing risk and liquidations. However, Ehsani admitted that attracting sufficient trading volume and liquidity for perpetual futures proved challenging.

Our attempt to launch perpetual futures trading directly on our platform didn’t succeed as well as we expected, mainly due to a lack of sufficient trading activity and liquidity,” Ehsani explained. “We prioritize honest and transparent reporting of our actual trading volume – we don’t engage in artificial inflation. Seeing the significant volume and diverse group of traders that Hyperliquid had attracted, we decided it made sense to connect to their platform instead.”

According to Jian from Hyperion, once major platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Intercontinental Exchange start heavily offering perpetual futures contracts (perps), traders will likely have chances to profit by taking advantage of price differences across different exchanges.

According to Jian, if you hold an investment on one platform like Robinhood and simultaneously have a corresponding position on another, such as Hyperliquid, you might notice something interesting. Because of increased activity from everyday investors simply buying and selling – what’s known as ‘non-toxic flow’ – you could see more natural fluctuations in funding rates.