On October 13, Hyperliquid activated HIP-3, a network upgrade that transforms the chain into fully open trading infrastructure that allows anyone who meets on-chain requirements to launch perpetual futures markets on the platform. Builders can list any perpetual contract they can source reliable data for, while traders gain access to an entirely new class of perpetual markets, everything from trading private companies to thematic indices and off-chain assets.

This is a bold redesign of what listing means in crypto, and it lands at the perfect moment, just as prediction markets prove there’s real demand for open, user-driven financial markets.

Before, Hyperliquid’s perpetual markets were gated, where validators or the core protocol team would decide which assets would be listed, under what terms, and when. Now that barrier disappears.

To deploy, a builder must stake 500,000 HYPE (roughly $18.8 million at current prices) which serves as a bond and can be slashed if a builder manipulates prices, mismanages risk, or disappears. For teams without $18 M, the stake can be amassed through pooled-staking models (more below), allowing communities to back new markets together. Each builder operates a fully independent perpetual DEX with its own orderbooks, oracle feeds, leverage parameters, and fee logic.

After the first three launched markets, which are exempt from auction, all additional listings enter a Dutch auction where deployers compete for the right to launch based on descending bid prices, a mechanism to pace new listings and discourage spam.

Developers earn a 50 % share of all trading fees generated on their markets, while traders pay about double the base validator fee, ensuring the core network still earns the same revenue.

The obvious takeaway is anyone can now list new perps. This enables lots of freedom. We’re about to see perps that stretch far beyond regular assets. In practice, it enables:

Late-stage equity, secondary shares, pre-IPO startups, these asset classes represent trillions of USD in illiquid value. If just 0.5–1% of secondary flows rout through on-chain synthetic markets over the next year, that’s an added $5–10B+ in liquidity accessible to anyone.

Music catalogs, collectibles, fashion editions, artwork, NFTs that don’t trade frequently: all of these can become perpetual markets. Users could trade exposure to the floor price of a sneaker or volume-based royalties of a music catalog. These are markets latent today. HIP-3 can give them currency.

Because perps enable leverage, new markets can create feedback loops that move their underlying valuations. Early buyers/shorts influence perceptions, which loop into funding rates and market trends. That speculative discovery is dangerous, but it’s also where alpha lives.

Builders capture fees. Traders bring volume. Liquidity aggregates. Capital in staking, collateral, and yield can cascade: stakers supply collateral to active deployers, deployers generate volume, which pulls more stakers. You get a compounding flywheel.

HIP-3 lays the foundation for an open derivatives economy where anything quantifiable or valued by a community can become a live, perpetual market.

The HIP-3 ecosystem already encompasses over 20 projects.

Ventuals has launched a platform that brings private markets on-chain, letting traders take perpetual positions on startup valuations like OpenAI, SpaceX, Kraken, and Neuralink. Traders can take leveraged positions on these valuations, using vHYPE, a liquid staking derivative of HYPE that pooled community capital to meet HIP-3’s 500k token requirement while earning yield.

Each market is powered by a hybrid oracle that blends secondary-market data with on-chain mark pricing to track private-company valuations in real time. Ventuals also operates a VLP vault, a community liquidity pool that helps market-make across its perps and share in trading revenue.

Apart from Ventuals, the HIP-3 ecosystem spans multiple verticals:

• Kinetiq leads liquidity and staking infrastructure, with a TVL of ~$1.9 B and a launch platform that lets smaller holders pool into perpetual deployment without needing the full 500k HYPE.

• Based is building a trading super-app frontend: it rolled out the XYZ100-USD index market and a “Based Streams” feature where creators livestream trades and reward followers, already hitting ~$35 M in 24h volume.

• Unit and Felix focus on tokenization, spot liquidity, and CDP lending stacks that complement HIP-3’s perp flows with infrastructure depth.

• Nunchi is designing yield-targeted perps, turning interest-rate spreads and funding-rate differentials into tradable derivatives.

• Projects in commodities, volatility, yield, and other exotic perps are also being built as developers explore all corners of what perpetual markets could become.

Most projects are still in the testnet phase and funding is primarily self-raised, perfectly aligned with Hyperliquid's core values of rejecting venture capital. As the infrastructure lowers the barrier to creation, an entire new layer of experimentation is emerging.

Hyperliquid’s growth was powered by one visceral truth: traders love leverage. The risk, the volatility, it just draws the most capital. The market always gravitates toward wherever leverage feels fast, liquid, and fair. That’s exactly what Hyperliquid nailed.

In the past year, it’s turned into crypto’s de facto trading venue, regularly posting $10–20 B in 24-hour perp volume with $7.2B current open interest, according to recent data from DefiLlama. At times, its monthly perp volume has reached 10–15 % of Binance’s, an insane feat for an on-chain protocol.

By giving developers the power to build and list their own markets, Hyperliquid shifts from being just a trading platform to a market-creation ecosystem, where each new deployment adds narrative weight, user flow, and data that feed back into a system which is a self-reinforcing loop of speculation and innovation.

With HYPE buybacks already tying volume to token value, HIP-3 could be the catalyst that cements it as the house of crypto trading. The place where the next generation of traders, builders, and bots all meet to play the world’s biggest on-chain leverage game.

It’s remarkable how far financial markets have come, from public equities not being available in certain countries to a world where anyone will soon be able to trade, with leverage, on almost anything of value, 24/7, globally. This is an excellent example of blockchain application which achieves something that just isn't possible to achieve off-chain.

Hyperliquid and its broader ecosystem are bringing speculation, liquidity, and creativity under one permissionless roof. Regardless of the risks that come with turning everything into a tradable market, it’s hard not to recognize how far they are pushing the frontier of open, programmable finance.

Progress always requires risk, and it's worth taking in moments like this.

Written by Trace Research — exploring on-chain markets.

On October 13, Hyperliquid activated HIP-3, a network upgrade that transforms the chain into fully open trading infrastructure that allows anyone who meets on-chain requirements to launch perpetual futures markets on the platform. Builders can list any perpetual contract they can source reliable data for, while traders gain access to an entirely new class of perpetual markets, everything from trading private companies to thematic indices and off-chain assets.

This is a bold redesign of what listing means in crypto, and it lands at the perfect moment, just as prediction markets prove there’s real demand for open, user-driven financial markets.

Before, Hyperliquid’s perpetual markets were gated, where validators or the core protocol team would decide which assets would be listed, under what terms, and when. Now that barrier disappears.

To deploy, a builder must stake 500,000 HYPE (roughly $18.8 million at current prices) which serves as a bond and can be slashed if a builder manipulates prices, mismanages risk, or disappears. For teams without $18 M, the stake can be amassed through pooled-staking models (more below), allowing communities to back new markets together. Each builder operates a fully independent perpetual DEX with its own orderbooks, oracle feeds, leverage parameters, and fee logic.

After the first three launched markets, which are exempt from auction, all additional listings enter a Dutch auction where deployers compete for the right to launch based on descending bid prices, a mechanism to pace new listings and discourage spam.

Developers earn a 50 % share of all trading fees generated on their markets, while traders pay about double the base validator fee, ensuring the core network still earns the same revenue.

The obvious takeaway is anyone can now list new perps. This enables lots of freedom. We’re about to see perps that stretch far beyond regular assets. In practice, it enables:

Late-stage equity, secondary shares, pre-IPO startups, these asset classes represent trillions of USD in illiquid value. If just 0.5–1% of secondary flows rout through on-chain synthetic markets over the next year, that’s an added $5–10B+ in liquidity accessible to anyone.

Music catalogs, collectibles, fashion editions, artwork, NFTs that don’t trade frequently: all of these can become perpetual markets. Users could trade exposure to the floor price of a sneaker or volume-based royalties of a music catalog. These are markets latent today. HIP-3 can give them currency.

Because perps enable leverage, new markets can create feedback loops that move their underlying valuations. Early buyers/shorts influence perceptions, which loop into funding rates and market trends. That speculative discovery is dangerous, but it’s also where alpha lives.

Builders capture fees. Traders bring volume. Liquidity aggregates. Capital in staking, collateral, and yield can cascade: stakers supply collateral to active deployers, deployers generate volume, which pulls more stakers. You get a compounding flywheel.

HIP-3 lays the foundation for an open derivatives economy where anything quantifiable or valued by a community can become a live, perpetual market.

The HIP-3 ecosystem already encompasses over 20 projects.

Ventuals has launched a platform that brings private markets on-chain, letting traders take perpetual positions on startup valuations like OpenAI, SpaceX, Kraken, and Neuralink. Traders can take leveraged positions on these valuations, using vHYPE, a liquid staking derivative of HYPE that pooled community capital to meet HIP-3’s 500k token requirement while earning yield.

Each market is powered by a hybrid oracle that blends secondary-market data with on-chain mark pricing to track private-company valuations in real time. Ventuals also operates a VLP vault, a community liquidity pool that helps market-make across its perps and share in trading revenue.

Apart from Ventuals, the HIP-3 ecosystem spans multiple verticals:

• Kinetiq leads liquidity and staking infrastructure, with a TVL of ~$1.9 B and a launch platform that lets smaller holders pool into perpetual deployment without needing the full 500k HYPE.

• Based is building a trading super-app frontend: it rolled out the XYZ100-USD index market and a “Based Streams” feature where creators livestream trades and reward followers, already hitting ~$35 M in 24h volume.

• Unit and Felix focus on tokenization, spot liquidity, and CDP lending stacks that complement HIP-3’s perp flows with infrastructure depth.

• Nunchi is designing yield-targeted perps, turning interest-rate spreads and funding-rate differentials into tradable derivatives.

• Projects in commodities, volatility, yield, and other exotic perps are also being built as developers explore all corners of what perpetual markets could become.

Most projects are still in the testnet phase and funding is primarily self-raised, perfectly aligned with Hyperliquid's core values of rejecting venture capital. As the infrastructure lowers the barrier to creation, an entire new layer of experimentation is emerging.

Hyperliquid’s growth was powered by one visceral truth: traders love leverage. The risk, the volatility, it just draws the most capital. The market always gravitates toward wherever leverage feels fast, liquid, and fair. That’s exactly what Hyperliquid nailed.

In the past year, it’s turned into crypto’s de facto trading venue, regularly posting $10–20 B in 24-hour perp volume with $7.2B current open interest, according to recent data from DefiLlama. At times, its monthly perp volume has reached 10–15 % of Binance’s, an insane feat for an on-chain protocol.

By giving developers the power to build and list their own markets, Hyperliquid shifts from being just a trading platform to a market-creation ecosystem, where each new deployment adds narrative weight, user flow, and data that feed back into a system which is a self-reinforcing loop of speculation and innovation.

With HYPE buybacks already tying volume to token value, HIP-3 could be the catalyst that cements it as the house of crypto trading. The place where the next generation of traders, builders, and bots all meet to play the world’s biggest on-chain leverage game.

It’s remarkable how far financial markets have come, from public equities not being available in certain countries to a world where anyone will soon be able to trade, with leverage, on almost anything of value, 24/7, globally. This is an excellent example of blockchain application which achieves something that just isn't possible to achieve off-chain.

Hyperliquid and its broader ecosystem are bringing speculation, liquidity, and creativity under one permissionless roof. Regardless of the risks that come with turning everything into a tradable market, it’s hard not to recognize how far they are pushing the frontier of open, programmable finance.

Progress always requires risk, and it's worth taking in moments like this.

Written by Trace Research — exploring on-chain markets.