Hyperliquid’s “Quiet Revolution”: From Crypto-Native to Full-Asset Trading Hub
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Hyperliquid’s “Quiet Revolution”: From Crypto-Native to Full-Asset Trading Hub
The story of Hyperliquid is, at its core, a “decentralized efficiency revolution.”
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Kulibei, TechFlow
Over the past month, crypto market attention has been fixated on Bitcoin’s volatile back-and-forth price action—or simply diverted to the booming bull run in gold and silver. Yet amid this seemingly dull sideways grind, one platform has quietly launched an offensive: Hyperliquid.
Three Numbers That Tell the Story
Let’s start with the data. On Monday, January 27, Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 open interest hit a record high of $793 million. Just one month earlier, it stood at only $260 million.
What is HIP-3?
In short, it’s Hyperliquid’s “permissionless perpetual contract deployment” feature, launched in October last year. Anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE tokens can deploy a perpetual contract market on the platform. It sounds technical—but the results are tangible: within less than four months of launch, HIP-3 markets have generated $25 billion in cumulative trading volume.
The second number is even more intriguing.
Jeff Yan, Hyperliquid’s CEO, recently shared a comparison chart showing that the bid-ask spread for BTC perpetuals on Hyperliquid is just $1—versus $5.50 on Binance. In terms of order book depth, Hyperliquid holds 140 BTC at certain price levels, while Binance holds only 80 BTC.
What does this mean? It means that, when it comes to liquidity, a decentralized exchange is now capable of going head-to-head with the world’s largest centralized exchange.
The third number is easily overlooked—but possibly the most critical: Silver perpetuals on Hyperliquid achieved $1.25 billion in 24-hour trading volume, making them the third-most-traded asset on the platform—behind only BTC and ETH. Gold perpetuals reached $131 million in 24-hour volume.
The hottest trading instruments on crypto exchanges are increasingly being dominated by traditional precious metals.
How Did Liquidity Build Up?
Hyperliquid’s liquidity growth follows a classic “flywheel effect.”
It began with Hyperliquid’s HyperBFT consensus algorithm, enabling transaction finality in just 0.2 seconds and processing up to 200,000 orders per second. These performance metrics convinced professional market makers to give it a try.
Once market makers realized “on-chain trading can be this fast,” they deployed more capital to provide liquidity. Deeper liquidity meant lower slippage—and retail and institutional traders soon noticed their trading experience was nearly indistinguishable from Binance’s. They began routing orders to Hyperliquid.
As trading volume rose, market makers earned more from fee-sharing, prompting further investment. More capital flowed in, deepening the order book and enabling larger single-order sizes—leading hedge funds and quant teams to add Hyperliquid to their execution venues.
Today, Hyperliquid accounts for roughly 70% of open interest across the entire decentralized perpetuals market—several times more than its closest competitor. That gap continues to widen.
The “Unexpected Boom” in Precious Metals Trading
The surge in gold and silver perpetuals seems puzzling at first glance: How did a crypto-native exchange become the de facto hub for precious metals trading?
In 2025, gold surged 67%—its biggest annual gain in 45 years. Silver soared even higher: up 145% last year, then another 53% this year, breaking above $117 per ounce—the all-time high.
Global central banks are buying gold. ETFs are buying gold. Retail investors are buying gold. “Inflation trades” have become consensus—everyone believes governments are printing money uncontrollably, fiat currencies will depreciate, and hard assets will preserve value.
But here’s the problem: Traditional financial markets impose high barriers to gold futures—limited leverage, KYC requirements, and cumbersome onboarding. On Hyperliquid, however, users can trade gold perpetuals with 50–100x leverage—no identity verification required—and capital efficiency is off the charts.
So a wave of hedge funds and commodity traders previously active on COMEX (the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) began opening positions on Hyperliquid—initially for gold, but quickly discovering, “Wait—trading BTC and ETH on-chain is *this* convenient too.”
This is the user migration logic: attract traditional finance professionals with a familiar instrument (gold), onboard them onto-chain infrastructure, and let them discover crypto-native trading opportunities organically.
TradeXYZ—the largest HIP-3 market deployer—now commands 90% of HIP-3 trading volume. Its top three markets are: XYZ100 (an index tracking the top 100 companies), silver, and NVIDIA stock perpetuals—with cumulative volumes of $12.7 billion, $3 billion, and $1.2 billion respectively.
This is no longer just a “crypto-native” exchange—it’s evolving into a “universal asset trading layer.”
Valuation Logic and Risks
HYPE surged 50% in one week, returning to ~$32. The rationale is straightforward: Hyperliquid allocates 97% of protocol fee revenue toward HYPE buybacks and burns. Higher trading volume → more fees → stronger buyback demand for HYPE.
As HIP-3 open interest climbed from $260 million to $793 million, and as silver perpetuals’ daily volume exceeded $1.25 billion, those figures directly translate into real fee income—and ultimately, into HYPE buy-side pressure.
Yet risks are mounting. HYPE’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) now exceeds $30 billion—a level that already prices in full expectations of Hyperliquid becoming a top-three DEX.
Short-term risks include:
Regulatory surprise. If the U.S. SEC or CFTC classifies Hyperliquid’s precious metals perpetuals as “unregistered commodity futures,” regulatory pressure could mount. While decentralized protocols are theoretically “uncensorable,” such pressure may spook market makers and institutional capital.
Intensifying competition. Every major exchange is eyeing the commodities and U.S. equities space—and could launch lower-fee or higher-performance alternatives at any time.
That said, from a trader’s perspective, as long as HIP-3 open interest keeps hitting new highs, BTC order book depth continues closing in on Binance’s, and precious metals volumes sustain growth—so long as these three metrics hold, HYPE remains firmly in an upward trend.
Underlying Logic: A Decentralized “Efficiency Revolution”
The Hyperliquid story is, at its core, a “decentralized efficiency revolution.”
In the past, DEXs sold themselves on “security”: when CEXs collapsed, on-chain exchanges became safe havens. That was passive, defensive value.
Now, leading DEXs are demonstrating *offensive* capability: using faster speeds, tighter spreads, and richer product suites to directly capture market share from CEXs.
Hyperliquid’s daily trading volume is now consistently 3–5x that of dYdX—and on certain smaller tokens, its order book depth even rivals Binance’s.
When on-chain trading feels indistinguishable from centralized exchanges—and users no longer need to sacrifice efficiency for decentralization—the entire market’s power structure begins to shift.
The explosion in precious metals perpetuals is merely the first step in this transformation. As more traditional assets gain sufficient on-chain liquidity—and as more traditional traders realize, “Decentralized exchanges can actually be *this* good”—the next frontier is full on-chain migration of equities, FX, and commodities.
What Hyperliquid is waging is less a frontal assault—and more a quiet, steady infiltration.
And that $793 million HIP-3 open interest? It’s just one milestone footnote in that infiltration campaign.
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