Hyperliquid

What I use it for

• Perps without an exchange account. Positions settle against an on-chain order book and the collateral stays in a wallet I control. That is a different counterparty profile from a centralised venue, not a better one, and the tradeoffs section below says why.
• A vault. I hold a legacy HyperCore vault. A vault leader earns 10% of profits above the high-water mark and has to keep at least 5% of the vault's equity in it, so the incentive is aligned by construction rather than by promise.
• The venue I am shifting more personal perp flow onto, next to Interactive Brokers for equities and OKX for the crypto bot fleet. The OKX bots are not moving. They work.

Why I picked it

• The order book is real. Not an AMM with a perp skin. Resting limit orders, a visible book, and liquidations that follow published rules. Latency is good enough that a systematic strategy behaves the way its backtest suggested.
• Fees go to the protocol, not to a company. That matters less for a single trade and more for the structure: there is no venue treasury with an incentive to widen spreads against its own users.
• Builder codes make it a platform, not just a venue. Any interface that routes an order can earn an attributed commission on it, capped at 0.1% on perps. Over 100 teams have integrated and roughly 40% of daily active users already trade through a third-party front end. That is the part of Hyperliquid that interests me as a builder, not only as a trader.
• No KYC to trade. Connect a wallet and you are on. Whether that is a feature depends entirely on your jurisdiction and your own compliance position.

Honest tradeoffs

• My own Hyperliquid strategy failed, and I am telling you rather than hiding it. A funding-rate bot I built here showed an apparent Sharpe of 4.35. Once I froze the universe, the real number was 1.50, because roughly 65% of that Sharpe came from retrospectively including a micro-cap market that listed part-way through the test window. 70% of the P&L landed in 2 months out of 7. I killed it. The venue was not the problem; my backtest hygiene was. Do not read a referral link as a claim that easy alpha lives here.
• Self-custody means the mistakes are yours. No password reset, no support desk that can reverse a bad signature. A lost key is a lost balance. If that sentence makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is the correct response and this is not your venue.
• Geo-blocked, including the United States. Hard stop for US residents. Check what applies where you actually sit before funding anything.
• Perp leverage is the fastest way to lose money in this entire stack. Everything else on this page can hurt you slowly. This one can do it in an afternoon. Size as if the position will be wrong.
• A vault costs 10,000 USDC to create. Mine is legacy, from before that fee existed. If you are reading this thinking of launching one, that number is the first thing to budget, and the legacy version does not support HIP-3 or spot.
• Young protocol, real smart-contract risk. Audited and battle-tested is not the same as old. Treat the balance as working capital, not treasury.

Who this is not for

If you want equities, options or a regulated broker with a phone number, use Interactive Brokers instead. If you want crypto spot with a fiat on-ramp and a demo environment, that is OKX. Hyperliquid is a narrower tool: on-chain perps for someone who already understands what self-custody costs them when it goes wrong.