The rise of Hyp, a new generation of on-chain derivatives "liquidity base"

Summary

Over the past two years, the decentralized derivatives sector has experienced explosive growth. As regulatory and trust crises in CeFi continue to emerge, user demand for high-performance, transparent, and verifiable on-chain derivatives platforms has rapidly increased. Hyperliquid has emerged against this backdrop. Core to its proprietary high-performance chain and fully on-chain order book, and with the vision of "as fast as centralized exchanges, but without the centralized trust," Hyperliquid has steadily become the undisputed leader in the DeFi perpetual contracts market.

By mid-2025, Hyperliquid had captured 70–80% of the decentralized derivatives market, with an average daily trading volume reaching tens of billions of dollars and a TVL exceeding $2 billion. Its token, HYPE, once ranked among the top ten in terms of market capitalization. The community even dubbed it the "on-chain Binance." However, Hyperliquid isn't solely focused on transaction volume; its true ambition is to build a cross-chain liquidity infrastructure, allowing users to deposit, leverage, and settle and withdraw funds across chains with a single click from their wallets. This research report will comprehensively analyze Hyperliquid from the following perspectives: team background and organizational structure, product features and trading models, governance and institutional design, the cornerstones of user trust, market performance and the competitive landscape, implications for DEX marketing, and risks and challenges.

1. Team Background and Organizational Structure

Hyperliquid's rise is largely due to its unique team composition and organizational culture. Unlike many crypto projects that rely on large teams and massive funding, Hyperliquid has, since its inception, pursued a lean, efficient, and technology-driven approach. Its core competitiveness lies in the high execution of a small team, its engineering DNA, and its commitment to community ownership. Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan has a distinct background in quantitative and systems engineering. A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, he previously worked as a quantitative trader at Hudson River Trading (HRT), a leading global high-frequency trading firm. HRT, a leading high-frequency trading firm on Wall Street, has stringent requirements for technical latency and system performance. In this environment, Jeff developed a deep understanding of ultra-low latency matching systems, quantitative model building, and market microstructure. In 2018, he entered the crypto industry, initially exploring how to migrate traditional high-frequency trading experience to a decentralized environment. By 2022, he officially founded Hyperliquid with a clear mission: to build a high-performance trading platform that "combines high-frequency trading with on-chain mechanisms." Unlike many crypto entrepreneurs, Jeff isn't interested in BD or capital operations. He firmly believes that only by focusing resources on product development and system iteration can he truly stand out in the fiercely competitive market. This technology-focused entrepreneurial approach has laid the foundation for Hyperliquid's development and shaped the team's DNA: quantitative thinking, a systems engineering orientation, and a relentless pursuit of extreme performance. Hyperliquid's team is exceptionally lean. According to public reports and community estimates, the core team consists of only approximately 11 people, yet they support a platform with daily trading volume easily exceeding tens of billions of dollars. Compared to traditional fintech companies with R&D and operations teams often numbering in the hundreds, this scale is almost unbelievable. This "small team, high output" model is also reflected in its financial metrics. According to community statistics and third-party research as of August 2025, Hyperliquid's average annual revenue per employee exceeds $100 million, with total revenue reaching the billion-dollar mark. The company is known as "one of the most productive companies in the world." This impressive efficiency demonstrates not only the team's execution capabilities but also the high degree of automation and stability of its underlying systems. Order matching, risk management, and clearing mechanisms rely almost entirely on automated systems, allowing team members to focus primarily on protocol iteration and functionality expansion rather than daily maintenance and manual intervention. This model reduces marginal labor costs, enabling the team to achieve maximum market coverage with minimal scale. Importantly, this high efficiency comes without sacrificing security. Hyperliquid's matching engine and on-chain mechanisms have withstood multiple extreme market conditions, maintaining stable system operation and user assets safe and secure without major incidents. This reassures the market that even small teams can, through exceptional engineering capabilities and mechanism design, build trading infrastructure comparable to that of traditional giants. In addition to the founders' backgrounds and team size, Hyperliquid's organizational culture is also a unique advantage. First, the team adheres to the principle of "better to have fewer than the wrong people" in recruitment. Many members come from top academic and financial institutions such as MIT, Caltech, and Citadel, and possess highly professional backgrounds. Rather than rapidly expanding with a large workforce, Hyperliquid prioritizes the deep commitment of its core members to maintain efficient execution. Second, the team demonstrates strong values ​​in its choice of capital. They explicitly reject external VC investment, emphasizing a "no VC" approach. This decision is iconic in the crypto industry. Many projects seek resources through large-scale fundraising in their early stages, but this often results in governance and value capture swaying in favor of capital. Hyperliquid, on the other hand, drives its development through self-funding and organic growth, ensuring that value capture accrues to the community, not capital. This not only strengthens users' sense of belonging to the platform but also establishes a differentiated narrative. Hyperliquid also adheres to this governance philosophy. Platform fees and revenue are fed back into the HLP protocol treasury and ecosystem fund, and the team does not take a profit cut. This arrangement ensures users experience transparency and fairness in the platform's operations, alleviating concerns about centralized arbitrage. As the community's voice in governance and ecosystem development grows, Hyperliquid has gradually fostered a culture of "user ownership." This culture has been a key factor in its rapid win of user trust and has built a community moat for the platform's long-term development. In summary, Hyperliquid's team and organizational structure exhibit three distinct characteristics: The founders' backgrounds shape their DNA: their accumulated experience in quantitative and high-frequency trading gives the platform inherent engineering and performance advantages; a small team achieves high efficiency: with just over a dozen people, they support tens of billions of dollars in trading volume, resulting in extremely high capital and human efficiency; and an organizational culture that emphasizes community ownership: rejecting venture capital and emphasizing transparent distribution, continuously strengthening user trust and engagement. This organizational model defies the conventional wisdom that scale alone leads to success, proving that in the DeFi space, small, focused, user-centric teams can also grow to become industry leaders. Hyperliquid's team story not only underscores its success but also provides a valuable lesson for those who follow: in the world of open finance, the most scarce resources aren't capital or human resources, but rather exceptional engineering capabilities, clear values, and consistent, long-term institutional design.

Product Features and Trading Model

Hyperliquid's rapid rise stems not only from its team's engineering prowess and organizational culture, but also from its product architecture and trading model, which are key to its market competitiveness. In the DeFi derivatives space, most protocols face the dilemma of "lack of performance versus security and trust." Hyperliquid, however, has successfully struck a balance between performance and decentralization through its proprietary dual-engine architecture, fully on-chain order book, innovative HLP protocol vault, and rigorous leverage risk management system. This enables the platform to offer a trading experience close to that of a centralized exchange (CEX) while maintaining the transparency and openness of DeFi. This makes it one of the only platforms currently to truly combine the speed of a CEX with the security of DeFi. Hyperliquid's underlying technical architecture is comprised of two engines: HyperCore and HyperEVM, focused on performance and openness, respectively. HyperCore is the platform's core matching and trading system, responsible for matching and executing spot and perpetual contracts. Its performance is comparable to that of traditional centralized exchanges, with a median matching latency of approximately 200 milliseconds and a throughput of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. This means high-frequency traders and institutional investors can execute complex strategies on-chain without sacrificing competitive advantage due to latency and slippage. HyperEVM, an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible environment, hosts on-chain contracts and ecosystem expansion capabilities. This ensures that Hyperliquid maintains high performance while remaining composable with the Ethereum ecosystem and the broader DeFi protocol ecosystem. Using the HyperEVM, Hyperliquid can rapidly expand to more financial applications, including lending, liquidity staking, and asset issuance, forming a complete on-chain financial closed loop. This "dual-engine" model is designed to balance performance and verifiability: HyperCore focuses on extreme speed and stability, while HyperEVM ensures system openness and ecosystem diversity. It is this architectural innovation that enables Hyperliquid to pioneer the goal of "CEX experience + DeFi security." Regarding its trading model, Hyperliquid has chosen a distinct path from the mainstream AMM model: a fully on-chain order book (CLOB). Traditional decentralized exchanges mostly rely on AMMs (Automated Market Makers). While these offer permissionless liquidity, they inherently limit depth, slippage, and high-frequency strategies. Hyperliquiquit, on the other hand, moves the order book and matching logic entirely on-chain, making the entire process of user order placement, cancellation, matching, and liquidation verifiable. This design offers two advantages: First, it significantly enhances fairness and transparency. All orders and matching results are recorded on-chain, eliminating backroom operations or market maker manipulation. Furthermore, it opens the door to institutional users and high-frequency traders. These users are familiar with order-book-based trading and rely on complex order placement and cancellation strategies to manage risk and achieve arbitrage. Hyperliquid's on-chain order book environment meets their dual needs for depth, speed, and programmability, enabling them to execute complex strategies similar to those on CEXs without the risk of custody. Providing stable liquidity and clearing capabilities has always been a challenge in DeFi derivatives trading. Hyperliquid innovatively addresses this pain point with its HLP (Holdings) mechanism. HLP plays a three-pronged role: Liquidity Provider: HLP undertakes the platform's primary market-making function, ensuring deep and stable liquidity for both buyers and sellers. Risk Buffer: In the event of user losses or market volatility, HLP acts as a systemic risk hedging pool, absorbing liquidation losses and avoiding the ADL (Automatic Deleveraging) common on traditional exchanges. This ensures that profitable users are not forced to close their positions due to systemic risk. Revenue Sharing Mechanism: All users who deposit funds into HLP share in the platform's transaction fee and funding rate revenue. The greatest significance of this design lies in democratization. In CEXs, market making and clearing are typically controlled by a small number of privileged market makers, precluding direct participation by ordinary users. On Hyperliquid, however, every depositor can become part of the market making process, sharing in the dividends of market growth. In the long term, this not only strengthens user loyalty but also enhances the platform's risk management resilience. Leverage and risk control are core to the derivatives market. Hyperliquid offers high leverage while also establishing a dynamic risk management mechanism. The platform supports up to 40–50x leverage, meeting the needs of professional traders. However, for small-cap currencies or large positions, the system proactively lowers the leverage limit to prevent systemic risk caused by individual extreme positions. The funding rate calculation also reflects the robustness of the platform. Unlike some platforms that calculate funding rates based on internal prices or pool conditions, Hyperliquid's funding rates are based on external oracle prices, ensuring prices are anchored to the real market and preventing internal manipulation. Frequent fee settlements (typically every 8 hours) further ensure a dynamic market balance. Through this series of mechanisms, Hyperliquid maintains the appeal of high-leverage trading while ensuring manageable systemic risk and a predictable user experience. This builds a relatively solid bridge of trust between whales and retail traders. Overall, Hyperliquid's products and trading model demonstrate a sophisticated systems engineering approach: Its dual HyperCore + HyperEVM engines achieve a balance between performance and openness; its fully on-chain order book provides institutional-grade fairness and depth; its HLP protocol vault democratizes market making and clearing functions; and its leverage and risk control systems maintain platform security and stability while attracting high-frequency and professional users. This comprehensive product ecosystem not only addresses long-standing pain points in decentralized derivatives but also creates a unique competitive advantage for Hyperliquid. It allows users to seamlessly switch between CEX and DeFi, while also fostering long-term trust and loyalty through transparent systems and revenue distribution mechanisms. This has enabled Hyperliquid to quickly stand out in a highly competitive market, becoming a leading provider of liquidity. Another core competitive advantage of Hyperliquid lies in its openness, scalability, and rapid iteration achieved through innovative governance and systems. Since its inception, the project has utilized a mechanism similar to Ethereum's EIPs—the Hyper Improvement Proposal (HIP)—as the foundation for community consensus and product iteration. Through HIP, Hyperliquid not only solves the liquidity cold start and asset listing issues, but also provides an institutionalized path for the expansion of the derivatives market, significantly enhancing the platform's ecosystem diversity. The launch of HIP-1 marks a significant first step in Hyperliquid's governance and institutional design. Through this mechanism, any project can create its own token on the platform and quickly launch a spot market by simply paying a certain amount of HYPE tokens. This mechanism breaks the monopoly of exchanges on CEXs and avoids the bottleneck of traditional DEXs that rely on external liquidity guidance. In other words, HIP-1 standardizes and regularizes the process of listing, enabling projects to enter the market in a completely permissionless environment while significantly reducing cold start costs. If HIP-1 solved the problem of "how to list a token," HIP-2 further addresses the challenge of "how to maintain market depth in the early stages." In traditional markets, new assets often lack active liquidity from both buyers and sellers when they are listed, resulting in high slippage and unstable trading. Hyperliquid introduced automated market making (Hyperliquidity) through HIP-2, providing fundamental buying and selling depth for new projects. This not only improves the user experience but also helps new assets gain faster market acceptance. Notably, this automation isn't simply a liquidity incentive; it's based on systematic algorithms and the rational allocation of capital pools, ensuring the sustainability of market making. HIP-3 is arguably a landmark innovation in Hyperliquid's governance and institutional design. According to this proposal, any Builder who stakes 1 million HYPE and participates in a Dutch auction will gain the right to deploy a perpetual contract market. More importantly, Builders will receive up to 50% of transaction fee revenue in the new market and can customize trading parameters and fees. This mechanism greatly unleashes community creativity, shifting the power of perpetual contract market provision from the official team to ecosystem participants. The potential impact of HIP-3 is profound: It enables Hyperliquid to rapidly expand into long-tail assets such as RWAs (real-world assets), indices, commodities, foreign exchange, and even pre-IPO stocks, creating a differentiated product offering compared to CEXs. Its high staking threshold and auction mechanism screen out builders with long-term commitment and financial strength, preventing the proliferation of low-quality markets. It ties fee sharing with governance, providing the community with clear economic incentives to expand into new markets. Overall, the HIP series of proposals exemplifies the logic of Hyperliquid's institutional design: first, lowering barriers to entry through open listing and automated market making, then achieving decentralized supply and scalability through the Builder mechanism. This governance framework not only addresses the growth bottlenecks of traditional DEXs but also lays the institutional foundation for Hyperliquid's long-term evolution. In decentralized finance, user trust is fundamental to the platform's long-term success. While Hyperliquid's core matching logic and fund flow mechanism may appear to outsiders to have a certain "centralized" quality, it has nonetheless established strong user trust in a short period of time. This trust stems from the combined effects of performance, system, and narrative. First, performance and user experience are the most immediate draws. Hyperliquid offers trading speed and depth approaching those of centralized exchanges, with matching latency as low as 200 milliseconds, sufficient to support the needs of high-frequency traders and institutional users. The on-chain user experience is virtually seamlessly integrated with CEXs, without the risks of centralized custody. Second, transparency and non-custodial nature provide users with a greater sense of security. The platform does not employ profit-taking mechanisms; all transaction fee revenue is reinvested into the HLP protocol treasury and ecosystem fund. Users maintain control of their assets, with all transaction records traceable on-chain, a stark contrast to the "black box" nature of traditional exchanges. Third, community ownership forms the foundation of trust at the value level. Hyperliquid has consistently rejected venture capital investment and does not channel profits to external capital, adhering to the principle that "users are owners." This narrative not only dispels concerns about a "game between capital and users," but also allows users to psychologically view themselves as co-builders and long-term beneficiaries of the platform. Furthermore, the whale effect amplifies the transfer of trust. Well-known investor James Wynn, for example, generated exceptional returns by trading hundreds of millions of dollars with high leverage on the platform. Such transparent and visible success stories have greatly strengthened the trust of ordinary users and driven further capital inflows. Finally, deflationary and incentive mechanisms reinforce expectations of token value. The HYPE token serves not only as a governance and staking tool but also offers fee discounts. A portion of the platform's revenue is used for token buybacks and burns. This design fosters a direct correlation between platform growth and token value, leading to a greater willingness to hold and participate long-term. In summary, Hyperliquid's trust flywheel is driven by a combination of technical performance, transparent systems, community ownership, demonstration effects, and a deflationary mechanism. This complex trust structure quickly overcame the controversy surrounding its "trust-required nature" like CEX platforms, instead establishing a unique competitive advantage. By 2025, Hyperliquid had become the undisputed leader in the DeFi perpetual swap market, with a market share stabilizing between 70% and 80%. Its average daily trading volume reached tens of billions of dollars, far exceeding that of other decentralized derivatives platforms and comparable in size to some mid-sized centralized exchanges. According to DefiLlama data, Hyperliquid's protocol has generated $1.345 billion in annualized fees, $110.26 million in fees over the past 30 days, and $660.98 million in cumulative fees. Meanwhile, annualized revenue has reached $1.251 billion, $102.55 million in revenue over the past 30 days, and $636.46 million in cumulative revenue. This scale makes Hyperliquid a veritable "on-chain liquidity foundation." In terms of capital volume, Hyperliquid's TVL exceeds $2 billion, reflecting user asset retention and protocol security. Its token, HYPE, has a market capitalization of $16 billion, with a fully diluted valuation (FDV) exceeding $46 billion. This high valuation not only reflects market recognition of its business model but also demonstrates widespread investor confidence in its long-term growth potential. Hyperliquid's speed and user experience are comparable to those of centralized giants like Binance. Its non-custodial and community-owned design avoids the trust and regulatory challenges inherent in the CeFi model. Against the backdrop of declining global user trust in CEXs, this differentiation has become a strategic advantage for Hyperliquid. However, with tightening regulations in the future, balancing the tension between "no KYC, cross-chain freedom" and "compliance requirements" will become a challenge Hyperliquid must face as it continues to expand. Within the DEX market, Hyperliquid's advantages are also clear: Compared to AMM-based DEXs (such as Uniswap), Hyperliquid offers more professional order book trading tools and deeper liquidity, attracting institutional and high-frequency users. Compared to order book DEXs like dYdX V4, Hyperliquid's proprietary high-performance L1 and HLP models demonstrate superior performance and resilience, avoiding the performance bottlenecks of relying on external chains. Overall, Hyperliquid has established a de facto monopoly in the DeFi perpetual contract market. It is both a challenger to CEXs and a leader in DEX development. Hyperliquid's governance and institutional design, through the HIP series of proposals, achieves full openness throughout the entire process, from listing to market making to derivatives market expansion. Its user trust stems from a combined flywheel of performance, transparency, and value proposition, and its market performance demonstrates the success of this model. By 2025, it will not only dominate DeFi perpetual swaps but also serve as the prototype for "on-chain liquidity infrastructure." However, regulation and governance remain key challenges going forward. For other DEXs, Hyperliquid's experience demonstrates that only by combining technological performance, institutional innovation, and a compelling value narrative can one establish a long-term moat amidst fierce competition. V. Risks and Challenges While Hyperliquid has achieved a rapid leap from a small team to market dominance, any rapidly growing financial infrastructure inevitably faces a series of risks and challenges. For Hyperliquid, these challenges not only determine its ability to maintain its leading position but also impact the overall landscape of the DeFi derivatives market. The primary challenge stems from the uncertainty of the global regulatory environment. Hyperliquid's model emphasizes no KYC and free cross-chain capital flow, which offers advantages in terms of user experience and market expansion, but could also pose potential compliance risks. Regulators around the world are increasingly concerned about leverage risks, anti-money laundering requirements, and cross-border capital flows in crypto derivatives, and may introduce mandatory registration or identity verification requirements in the future. If Hyperliquid faces regional restrictions, it could impact its user growth and liquidity. Unlike CeFi platforms, DeFi protocols face difficulties in addressing compliance through traditional licensing. Balancing regulatory compliance with the spirit of decentralization will be a long-term challenge for Hyperliquiquid. While Hyperliquid advocates for "user ownership" and democratizes governance through HIP proposals and the HLP treasury, the risk of centralized governance persists in practice. For example, during the JELLYJELLY manipulation incident, the Hyper Foundation was required to intervene in governance and market intervention, demonstrating that the ecosystem still relies on the core team's ultimate decision-making. This phenomenon reveals a paradox: decentralized institutional designs often still require centralized support when faced with complex governance or malicious attacks. Future optimization of the validator governance mechanism and ensuring a balanced interest between builders and users will directly impact Hyperliquid's long-term sustainability. Hyperliquid's high-performance matching engine and cross-chain bridge design are competitive advantages, but they also pose systemic risks. During extreme market volatility or large-scale liquidation events, cross-chain deposits, clearing, and fund settlements may be subject to significant pressure. Delays or failures could undermine user trust. Furthermore, while the HLP vault bears the majority of risk, its ability to withstand extreme losses is limited. Improving system resilience without compromising user experience is an area in which Hyperliquid must continue to invest.

Hyperliquid's revenue is highly dependent on market activity, particularly the leverage demand in derivatives trading. During bull markets, trading volume and fee income can grow rapidly, but during bear markets, declining trading activity can lead to a significant decline in protocol revenue. If the platform fails to maintain adequate profit distribution during downturns, it could undermine HLP depositor enthusiasm, further impacting market depth and overall ecosystem stability. Cyclical risks in the business model need to be partially mitigated through diversified product offerings (such as RWAs and lending). Furthermore, Hyperliquid's brand narrative, built on its rejection of VC and community ownership, is a key differentiating asset. However, any allegations of hidden profits by the team or controversy surrounding its governance structure could quickly erode user trust in this narrative. Furthermore, with the growing influence of the whale effect, some users worry that Hyperliquid's over-reliance on large investor funds could lead to market volatility and uneven distribution of benefits. If not properly managed, these perceived risks could potentially lead to community rifts. Summary: Regulation, governance, system stability, market cycles, and brand perception are the five major sources of risk for Hyperliquid going forward. These challenges won't diminish its current leading position, but they will determine whether it can become a true "cross-chain liquidity infrastructure."

VI. Implications for DEX Marketing

Hyperliquid's success lies not only in its product offerings but also in its highly instructive model of narrative and institutions. Hyperliquid's approach offers clear lessons for newcomers hoping to rise in the decentralized exchange market. These include: 1. Narrative-driven: User ownership and value return. Hyperliquid consistently emphasizes "no VC, user ownership," and implements this through fee sharing and HLP revenue sharing. This narrative not only enhances user belonging but also builds strong community engagement. For any DEX, narrative isn't simply promotional; it's a unified system and practice: only when users can truly feel the benefits of the platform's growth can a narrative have staying power. 2. Product-driven: Prioritizing both performance and user experience. Hyperliquid's core competitiveness stems from its "dual-engine architecture + fully on-chain order book." This demonstrates that in the DEX space, users won't compromise their experience requirements due to decentralization. On the contrary, they'll only be willing to use the platform long-term if performance approaches that of a CEX. Therefore, for newcomers, marketing shouldn't simply rely on the "decentralized" label; it must integrate "high performance, low latency, and transparent verification" to deliver a "fast and secure" product proposition to users. 3. Community-Driven: The Whale Effect and Retail Expansion. Hyperliquid's growth path is to first drive trading volume and liquidity through whale users, then leverage partnerships with wallets like Phantom to achieve retail expansion. This "top-down + bottom-up" dual-engine approach provides a reusable framework. For DEXs, early on, market trust can be established by showcasing successful cases from major users. In the medium and long term, deep integration with entry-level applications (wallets and aggregators) is crucial to integrating retail users into the ecosystem. 4. Mechanism-Driven: Open growth and profit-sharing logic. The success of HIP-3 demonstrates that an open ecosystem for builders is an effective way to expand the market. Through high-threshold staking and fee sharing, Hyperliquid delegates market creation power to the community, achieving scalable supply-side expansion. For marketing, this logic suggests that DEXs should consider "institutional design" itself as part of their growth narrative, emphasizing that the platform belongs to everyone, not just a few. 5. Brand-Driven: From DEX to "Liquidity Foundation." Hyperliquid no longer positions itself as a single exchange, but rather as a "cross-chain liquidity infrastructure." This positioning affords it greater strategic potential. For any DEX, the key to brand marketing lies in transcending the limitations of a "single-point application" and building a larger narrative, such as an "on-chain settlement layer" and a "cross-chain asset gateway," thereby achieving strategic value beyond a single product. The lesson for Hyperliquid is that the five dimensions of narrative, product, community, mechanism, and brand must be synergistically leveraged. Marketing is not a single action, but a unified output of institutions, products, and strategy.

VII. Conclusion

Hyperliquid's story is a crucial footnote to the new era of decentralized finance. From its humble beginnings as a team of less than 20 people to its current 70–80% market share in the decentralized perpetual swap market, the driving forces behind this growth can be summarized as three key points: engineering culture, institutional design, and narrative values.

On an engineering level, Hyperliquid, leveraging a lean team, has built its own high-performance blockchain and a fully integrated on-chain order book, proving that even a small team can surpass traditional giants in systems engineering. On an institutional level, through its HIP series of proposals and the HLP protocol treasury, Hyperliquid has unified market expansion, risk management, and revenue sharing. On a narrative level, by rejecting VCs and emphasizing community ownership, Hyperliquid has fostered a sense of belonging and value recognition among users. These three elements together form Hyperliquid's "trust flywheel," making it not only a dominant force in DeFi derivatives but also the prototype of a new generation of on-chain financial infrastructure. Looking ahead, the challenges Hyperliquid must face are equally clear: a tightening regulatory environment, the risks of centralized governance, system resilience in extreme market conditions, and the impact of market cycles on revenue models. However, the paradigm it has pioneered already provides a valuable lesson for the industry. For newcomers, Hyperliquid's experience demonstrates that in the fierce competition of decentralized exchanges, only by combining performance advantages, institutional innovation, and a compelling value narrative can a truly long-term moat be built. In a sense, Hyperliquid is more than just a DEX; it has taken a crucial step toward becoming a "cross-chain liquidity foundation." Its emergence heralds that the future of DeFi will no longer be a collection of single applications, but will gradually evolve into a global financial network with performance comparable to CEXs, transparent systems, and community governance.