What HYPE is
Hyperliquid is a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for trading. Hyperliquid Labs was formed in 2022 by a small team led by Jeff Yan, a former Hudson River Trading engineer, and took no venture capital. A closed alpha ran in early 2023 and the public mainnet followed later that year. By 2026 it had become one of the largest venues for crypto perpetual futures, centralized or not.
The chain has two parts that share one consensus: HyperCore, which runs the order books and margin engine, and HyperEVM, a general-purpose smart-contract layer that went live on February 18, 2025. The HYPE token launched in a genesis event on November 29, 2024 that airdropped about 310 million HYPE to roughly 94,000 wallets, one of the largest airdrops in crypto.
How it works
Consensus is HyperBFT, a proof-of-stake protocol derived from HotStuff, with median latency around 0.2 seconds and throughput the team puts at about 200,000 orders per second. Every order, cancellation, trade and liquidation is recorded on-chain rather than matched off-chain. The validator set is small, roughly 21 to 27 validators in 2026, and HYPE is staked to them and used as gas on HyperEVM.
Supply is capped at one billion: 31% went to the genesis airdrop, 38.8% is reserved for future emissions and community rewards, 23.8% to core contributors (unlocking monthly, about 14 million HYPE a month in 2026), 6% to the Foundation, and none to investors. Roughly 97 to 99% of trading fees flow to the Assistance Fund, which buys HYPE on the open market; cumulative buybacks passed about $1.3 billion by mid-2026.
Use cases
The core use is trading perpetual futures and spot on an on-chain order book with centralized-exchange speed. HIP-3, live since October 13, 2025, lets builders deploy their own perpetual markets by staking 500,000 HYPE, and HIP-4 added outcome (prediction) markets on May 2, 2026. HyperEVM hosts lending, liquid staking and other DeFi that can plug into HyperCore liquidity. TerminalFeed's Open Interest panel and ETH/BTC row read Hyperliquid market data.
Tradeoffs and criticism
A small validator set can act collectively: in March 2025 validators voted to delist the JELLY market after a squeeze on the protocol's HLP vault. The node software ships as a closed-source binary. Manipulation attacks have cost the vault money more than once, including roughly $5 million of bad debt from a POPCAT attack in late 2025. During the October 10, 2025 crash about $10.3 billion of positions were liquidated on Hyperliquid and it triggered its first cross-margin auto-deleveraging, force-closing some profitable positions. Monthly contributor unlocks add supply, and the platform is not regulated in the US; in August 2026 President Trump said the CFTC was working on a compliant US path, but no framework had been published.
Where to track HYPE
The dashboard Open Interest panel tracks Hyperliquid perpetual markets by dollar open interest, with changes measured in coin terms. See order book and staking for background.