💬 Our take
“An order-book exchange wearing an L1 like a hat. The hat works.”
Hyperliquid's bet was that perps belong on-chain and the only way to ship that experience is to build your own L1 optimized for an order book. Two years in, the bet is paid: $2 billion+ in TVL, $600-700 million in daily DEX volume, and a fee-recycling design that sends 97% of revenue back to users via the HYPE token.
The HLP market-making vault is where passive capital gets returns CEX-like enough to matter. Real APR depends on volume, but the vault has done what stETH did for ETH staking: turned a complicated thing into a one-click product. TVL keeps compounding because the math actually works.
Risks are well-documented and unchanged: single-sequencer dependency, concentrated token ownership, no formal regulatory perimeter. None have bitten yet. The day one of them does is the day Hyperliquid becomes interesting for a different reason.
Words from the take, defined.
- perp DEX
- Decentralized exchange for perpetual futures — leveraged contracts on a coin's price that don't expire. Like Binance Futures but on-chain.
- HLP vault
- Hyperliquid's market-making vault. Users deposit, vault provides liquidity to the perp order book, depositors earn the spread and fees.
- fee recycling
- A protocol uses revenue to buy back its own token from the open market, returning value to holders rather than founders.
Go check it out
hyperliquid.xyz