Hyperliquid

In 2022, former HFT traders Jeff Yan and Iliensinc founded Hyperliquid, building the HyperCore order-book chain for on-chain perps and rejecting all VC funding.

In 2023, Hyperliquid's mainnet launched quietly, attracting professional traders with no KYC and an on-chain order book.

On 29 November 2024, Hyperliquid airdropped 31% of HYPE (~310M tokens) to ~94k users, the largest airdrop in crypto history.

In February 2025, HyperEVM mainnet launched, extending Hyperliquid into a general financial L1.

In 2025, Hyperliquid handled $2.9T in volume, capturing the majority of the on-chain perp market.

In May 2026, Bitwise launched a spot HYPE ETF based on Hyperliquid (BHYP) on the NYSE.

In 2026, S&P 500 perpetuals listed on Hyperliquid, expanding into traditional-asset derivatives.

Buyback & burn upgrade: AQAv2 completed its first payout on October 3, routing 90% of the yield on USDC reserves held on Hyperliquid into the Assistance Fund to buy back and burn HYPE, an estimated $182 million per year that lifts daily buybacks by about 18%; USDH is being phased out in favor of USDC, deployed with Circle and Coinbase.

Ecosystem & market: Since November 2024, the fund has retired over 46.2 million HYPE (about $1.27 billion). Under the HIP-3 framework, an Entropy-deployed synthetic Anthropic perpetual implied a $1.95 trillion valuation on October 15, EQX plans to list 11 tokenized U.S. equities, and 3.75 million team tokens were sold OTC to an institution in October. HYPE fell back to around $81 in mid-October, roughly 17% below its September high.

By October 16, 2026 HIP-3 builder markets held about $3.03 billion in open interest across 124 markets; a Bitwise report on October 21 showed $261.5 billion in non-crypto perpetual volume in the third quarter, 36.5% of all perpetual trading, with equity-linked markets among the largest. In October, Bloomberg Terminal began streaming 24-hour Hyperliquid perpetual prices.

The Assistance Fund kept buying back tokens: cumulative purchases passed 48 million HYPE, about $1.36 billion, as of October 13, with roughly $10 million bought and burned on October 5 and $8.2 million on October 7, the largest single buyback day of 2026. Platform open interest hit a record $18 billion in September. Testnet work advanced on a priority-fee mechanism, the 10 HYPE rule, and permissioned HIP-3 markets that let deployers restrict participating wallets through onchain lists. US spot HYPE ETFs have drawn about $311 million in cumulative net inflows.

Hyperliquid's Future strategy and roadmap: Hyperliquid already runs close to an exchange that pays out through its token: 97% to 99% of fees flow into the Assistance Fund to buy HYPE on the open market, about $1.28 billion to date, and AQAv2 routes 90% of USDC reserve yield into the same account, adding an estimated $135-160 million a year and loosening the link between cash flow and trading heat. HIP-3 is the growth engine: deployers stake 500,000 HYPE to open a market and keep half the fees, already about 30% of volume, though a single deployer holds more than 90% of it, a visible concentration risk, while HIP-4 brings outcome contracts onto the same ledger. The binding constraint is regulation, since equity and pre-IPO perpetuals put it against compliant products from Coinbase and Kraken.

Hyperliquid was founded in 2022 by Jeff Yan. Yan studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, then traded quantitative strategies and built market-making systems at Hudson River Trading. Co-founder iliensinc was his Harvard classmate; the two began prototyping around 2020.

Jake Chervinsky joined in 2025 to lead the Hyperliquid Policy Center, having been a policy adviser at the Blockchain Association and general counsel at Compound. Core developers come mostly from Hudson River Trading, Citadel and Silicon Valley infrastructure companies. Yan and iliensinc hold signing authority.

Hyperliquid charges perpetuals a base 0.015% maker fee and 0.045% taker fee, stepping down across seven tiers of 14-day weighted volume.

Hyperliquid sets 0.012% maker and 0.040% taker at the $5 million volume tier, 0.004% maker and 0.030% taker at $100 million, and 0.000% maker with 0.024% taker at $7 billion.

Hyperliquid charges spot a base 0.040% maker fee and 0.070% taker fee, with 5% to 40% discounts for staking 10 to 500,000 HYPE and a -0.003% maker rebate once maker volume reaches 3%.