Hyperliquid is without doubt one of the present bull market’s standout DeFi success tales. With every day buying and selling volumes having reached $4 billion, the change has turn out to be the most important decentralized (DEX) derivatives platform, commanding practically 60% of the market.
Hyperliquid nonetheless lags far behind Binance Futures’ $50 billion every day common quantity, however the pattern means that it has began to encroach on centralized change (CEX) territory.
What’s behind Hyperliquid’s parabolic rise?
Launched in 2023, Hyperliquid gained recognition in April 2024 after launching spot buying and selling. This, mixed with its aggressive itemizing technique and easy-to-use onchain consumer interface, helped to lure in a wave of latest customers.
The platform’s actual explosion, nevertheless, got here in November 2024, following the launch of its HYPE (HYPE) token. Hyperliquid’s buying and selling quantity skyrocketed, and it now boasts over 400,000 customers and greater than 50 billion trades processed, in response to information from Dune.
Hyperliquid cumulative trades and customers. Supply: Dune
Whereas Hyperliquid began as a high-performance perpetual futures and spot DEX, its ambitions have since expanded. With the launch of HyperEVM on Feb. 18, the mission has turn out to be a general-purpose layer-1 chain able to supporting third-party DeFi apps constructed on high of its infrastructure.
As one in all Hyperliquid’s founders, Jeff Yan, put it,
“Most L1s construct infrastructure and hope that others will come construct the killer apps. Hyperliquid takes the alternative method: polish a local software after which develop into general-purpose infrastructure.”
If this method works, the liquidity pushed by Hyperliquid’s core DEX might naturally feed into the broader ecosystem and vice versa, making a flywheel impact.
Associated: Hyperliquid flips Solana in charges, however is the ‘HYPE’ justified?
Will Hyperliquid turn out to be a sustainable CEX different?
In accordance with CoinGecko, Hyperliquid now ranks 14th amongst derivatives exchanges by open curiosity, sitting at $3.1 billion. That’s nonetheless behind Binance’s $22 billion however forward of older names like Deribit or derivatives divisions of Crypto.com, BitMEX, or KuCoin. It’s the primary time a DEX is competing so carefully with established CEXs.
Moreover, as Hyperliquid deepens its give attention to specialised buying and selling pairs, it continues to chip away on the market share of main exchanges. The DEX accepts not solely Arbitrum USDC as collateral but additionally native BTC. This makes it one of many few decentralized platforms that deal with BTC wrapping and unwrapping natively, giving customers the choice to make use of BTC for Web3-wallet-based buying and selling.
X consumer Skewga.hl famous that Hyperliquid’s BTC perpetual futures quantity share not too long ago hit an all-time excessive, reaching virtually 50% of Bybit’s and 21% of Binance’s. Skewga.hl wrote,
“No DEX has ever come this near matching Tier 1 CEX quantity.”
Each day quantity ratios, Hyperliquid vs Different exchanges (BTC perp). Supply: Skewga.hl
Since 2024, perpetual swaps have seen a revival as a buying and selling software. Throughout the 2021–2022 bull market, every day perps quantity averaged round $5 billion. In early 2025, that quantity typically exceeded $15 billion, with Hyperliquid accounting for practically two-thirds of it.
Knowledge from DefiLlama illustrates the shift: whereas dYdX (inexperienced) dominated in 2023–2024, the panorama diversified considerably in 2024—and by 2025, Hyperliquid (pink) had taken the lead.
Perps quantity breakdown. Supply: DefiLlama
Regardless of the current JELLY token scandal, which concerned the change halting buying and selling and delisting a low-market-cap token {that a} whale had exploited, Hyperliquid stays a preferred change amongst DeFi and DEX merchants. It has but to seize institutional investor flows or scale to the extent of top-tier CEXs. Nevertheless, if its layer 1 ecosystem positive aspects traction with builders, Hyperliquid might evolve into greater than only a main DEX.
This text doesn’t include funding recommendation or suggestions. Each funding and buying and selling transfer includes danger, and readers ought to conduct their very own analysis when making a choice.
