Hyperliquid HIP-3: Does decentralized listing rights really work?

Author: Crypto Wei Tuo

Listing Cost Estimation

According to the HIP-3 proposal, the costs of Hyperliquid listing new markets mainly include the following parts:

• Margin cost: Each market requires 500,000 HYPE, which is equivalent to a US$20 million margin at the current price of approximately US$40.

  If calculated based on an annualized opportunity cost of capital of 10%, the cost is US$2 million per year.

• Ticker costs: Assuming $5,000-10,000, which is negligible.

• Oracle + Gas costs: Approximately $80,000-90,000/year.

Therefore, the total cost of a new market in the first year is approximately $2.1 million (if the cost cannot be spread across multiple tickers).

This means that any project or market maker who wants to deploy a new contract market on Hyperliquid must first face an annualized threshold of approximately $2 million.

Who would actually deploy a new market? Participants who can afford these costs can be roughly divided into three categories: Hot new coins (such as XPL and PUMP) These projects have pricing power held by Binance, and with high expected fees, large market makers are incentivized to deploy early to gain a first-mover advantage in liquidity. However, the number of such projects is extremely small, with only a handful launched each year. Furthermore, Hyperliquid often proactively lists these coins, eliminating the need for externally paid listing costs. RWA (Real-Wait-Asset Tokenization) projects Pricing power is held off-chain, while on-chain markets are merely discrete. Trading is primarily driven by attention. While there are numerous projects, most have limited trading volume. Small cryptocurrencies at the level of Binance Alpha/Futures are discrete markets. Unless multiple market makers share the costs, deploying a single market is prohibitively expensive. For projects or small active market makers, rather than paying high margins, it's better to choose more realistic listing paths, such as Binance Alpha or Bitget Futures. The vast majority of small cryptocurrencies are able to trade futures contracts because of Binance Futures, not because of a specific on-chain contract market. If projects want to deploy their own markets using Hyperliquid, they will not only have to pay high listing costs but also have to address market making issues. However, large market makers typically avoid these low-liquidity projects because they prioritize trading volume, not listing qualifications. Furthermore, the current retail-driven alpha market (the logic behind the surge in small-cap coins) stems from projects in this third category—but relying on an orderbook matching model is unrealistic for these projects, as the inherent disadvantage of discrete markets is insufficient liquidity.

Those who are truly motivated are, on the contrary, project parties or market makers with sufficient funds and the initiative:

• they know that the project can bring in high transaction fee income;

• they have control over the contracts and can supplement the project's internal trading ecosystem;

• they can also partially recover costs by inflating their own volume.

These projects will regard listing as a cyclical investment in ecological mutual assistance. For small and medium-sized projects, this high-cost mechanism can be completely bypassed: Directly issuing a permissionless AMM Perp (Automated Market Making Perpetual Contract), which allows the project owner to lock the pool, collect transaction fees, and automatically make markets. As long as initial trading volume can be achieved, it can be used as a cold-start channel, and then subsequently climb onto mainstream platforms like Binance Futures. In comparison, HIP-3 does not have any significant advantages. Hyperliquid aims to build an institutional-level client network similar to that of CEXs. However, traditional exchanges' VIP systems are built around credit and lending conditions, not "listing privileges" per se. HIP-3's listing logic doesn't replicate the CEX credit system; it simply redistributes the "node listing privilege" through a decentralized packaging process. From a mechanism design perspective, HIP-3 is strikingly similar to Huobi's HADAX node voting mechanism for listing. The difference is that HIP-3 outsources the "voting for listing" to decentralized governance. However, historical experience shows that when listing rights become tied to personal interests, bribery and game-playing among nodes are inevitable. HADAX ultimately failed due to rampant "listing harvesting" and a lack of constraints and penalties on nodes. While the HIP-3 structure now cloaks itself in a "decentralized" guise, its core incentive logic remains unchanged. Summary: On the surface, HIP-3 provides a decentralized governance mechanism for "open coin listing." In reality, however, it resembles a closed club driven by profit and with extremely high barriers to entry. From capital costs to liquidity logic to market-making incentives, the true beneficiaries remain a handful of resource-rich players. While decentralization may appear superficial, it's certainly "useful"—but only for those who can afford it.