Hyperliquid is among the present bull market’s standout DeFi success tales. With each day buying and selling volumes having reached $4 billion, the trade has develop into the most important decentralized (DEX) derivatives platform, commanding almost 60% of the market.
Hyperliquid nonetheless lags far behind Binance Futures’ $50 billion each day common quantity, however the pattern means that it has began to encroach on centralized trade (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 person interface, helped to lure in a wave of recent customers.
The platform’s actual explosion, nonetheless, 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, based on knowledge 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 develop into a general-purpose layer-1 chain able to supporting third-party DeFi apps constructed on prime 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 other method: polish a local utility 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 develop into a sustainable CEX different?
In response to 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 deal with 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 person Skewga.hl famous that Hyperliquid’s BTC perpetual futures quantity share lately hit an all-time excessive, reaching nearly 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 instrument. Through the 2021–2022 bull market, each day perps quantity averaged round $5 billion. In early 2025, that quantity typically exceeded $15 billion, with Hyperliquid accounting for almost two-thirds of it.
Information 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 latest JELLY token scandal, which concerned the trade halting buying and selling and delisting a low-market-cap token {that a} whale had exploited, Hyperliquid stays a well-liked trade 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 features traction with builders, Hyperliquid might evolve into greater than only a main DEX.
This text doesn’t comprise funding recommendation or suggestions. Each funding and buying and selling transfer entails danger, and readers ought to conduct their very own analysis when making a call.