Hyperliquid: The great cryptocurrency project of 2025

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: Hyperliquid: The Great Cryptocurrency Project of 2025 Original Link:

Jeff Yan and the Rise of Hyperliquid

Jeff Yan had just witnessed the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire in a matter of days, in 2022. It was then, amidst the chaos of the FTX collapse and the contagion that followed, that Yan decided to bet everything on building his own cryptocurrency exchange — a decentralized alternative called Hyperliquid.

Now, three years later, Yan seems to have been rewarded. After co-founding Hyperliquid Labs in 2023, Yan helped develop one of the most impactful decentralized exchanges and layer-one networks in the 16-year history of cryptocurrencies — all without venture capital funding.

This year, Hyperliquid generated over US$ 2.73 trillion in perpetual futures contract trading volume, US$ 110.65 billion in spot trading volume, and achieved an annualized revenue of US$ 1.22 billion. To put this into perspective, Hyperliquid Labs is a team of just 11 people, and Hyperliquid users share in the company’s revenue.

The Impact of Perpetual Futures Contracts

Beyond the numbers, Hyperliquid’s impact on the industry can also be measured by how it helped popularize perpetual futures contracts, also known as perps, among native crypto traders. Perps allow traders to speculate on asset prices using derivative contracts that never expire, utilizing borrowed capital with varying levels of leverage.

This advanced trading tool was previously much less accessible, mainly available to accredited investors or traders on some centralized crypto exchanges willing to provide personal information.

Hyperliquid changed that, lowering the entry barrier like never before and causing competing exchanges to offer increasingly risky leverage options. As a result, Hyperliquid helped create a new class of crypto companies known as DEXs perpetual — short for decentralized exchanges specialized in perpetual futures contracts.

Financial Nihilism and Critical Concerns

To its critics, Hyperliquid is the latest high-powered financial tool designed for the digital era of financial nihilism — a mindset where the financial system is recognized as meaningless. Dr. Amin Samman, senior academic in international political economy, states: “What we have is a kind of growing bubble, like a simulated carnival built inside the financial void.”

The Rise of the Perpetual DEX

To understand Hyperliquid, one must first understand perpetual futures. Initially theorized by economist Robert Shiller in 1993 — but implemented in the crypto market by a centralized exchange in 2016 — perpetual futures contracts allow traders to speculate on an asset’s direction through a (“long”) or (“short”) position.

Unlike traditional futures contracts, perpetuals have no expiration date. This means they can be a useful tool for traders or market makers to hedge their bets indefinitely without worrying about contract expiry.

However, perpetual futures are often combined with dizzying levels of leverage. Hyperliquid offers leverage from 3x to 40x, meaning traders can borrow up to 40 times the collateral value and use that to multiply their gains — or losses.

Currently, there are over 100 tokens tradable as perps on Hyperliquid, ranging from established digital assets like Bitcoin to altcoins like Avalanche or highly volatile meme coins.

Perpetual futures contracts have dominated the crypto market, with the trading volume ratio between perpetual futures and spot contracts increasing by over 450% since January 2023. During July 2025, Hyperliquid processed approximately 56.6% of the entire perpetual futures market.

Greoire Magadini, Derivatives Director at an analysis firm, states that leverage and perpetual futures are sophisticated trading tools requiring complex management and an “active” approach to “ensure risk is well controlled.” The average retail investor entering perpetual futures DEXs is usually not well prepared for this.

Research analyst Sam Ruskin explains: “Market makers are essentially exploiting this flow of disinformed information… They are trying to capture the difference between what they think they know and what they actually know. Then, they add leverage to it, and it becomes an incredibly profitable business for a market maker.”

Accessibility and the “New American Dream”

One of Hyperliquid’s main success factors is that it operates on its own dedicated layer-one blockchain, where its order book is settled — meaning every transaction is executed on-chain. Hyperliquid also remains accessible to retail traders, with an intuitive user interface, easy onboarding process, and low entry barriers.

By catering to this casual audience, it sells the dream of “getting rich or dying trying,” according to analysts. “It’s essentially the new American Dream — just for cryptocurrencies,” Ruskin explains.

The idea is not unfounded; some people on Hyperliquid are actually making — and a lot. By November, one trader had made over US$ 108 million, mainly from shorting Ethereum; another made US$ 27 million from shorting the network’s native token.

But when people lose, they lose big. Like when a crypto influencer made a series of bad high-leverage trades and had their positions liquidated, totaling US$ 100 million.

Every operation on Hyperliquid is publicly available through block explorers. This is how crypto traders try to hunt for the so-called whales on the platform — large investors executing multimillion-dollar trades.

CEX vs DEX: The Fierce Competition

To access cryptocurrencies and high leverage levels on centralized exchanges, users must meet various requirements and may have their accounts restricted. They also need to create accounts using their names, emails, physical addresses, and other personally identifiable information.

On Hyperliquid, none of that applies — just connect a crypto wallet, deposit funds, and place a bet.

It is precisely this kind of “regulatory arbitrage” available on decentralized exchanges that draws users to Hyperliquid. “When perpetual futures and leverage are restricted to those with access to the traditional financial system or who must meet strict KYC requirements, we are just recreating the same access control that cryptocurrencies were designed to eliminate,” says Jakub Wojciechowski, founder and CEO of an infrastructure company.

This fierce competition among exchanges has led to improved leverage offerings, reduced margin requirements, increased liquidation limits, and much more. Some competing exchanges offer leverage of up to 1001x on selected assets.

Anyone in the crypto market unfamiliar with leverage received an intensive lesson on October 10, when US$ 19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated across the entire crypto market — the largest liquidation event in crypto history. Many analysts believe this cascade of liquidations was caused by excessive leverage in the market.

After the liquidation cascade, Hyperliquid Labs’ co-founder criticized centralized exchanges for underreporting “dramatically” user liquidations. On Hyperliquid, everything is recorded on the blockchain, visible to anyone and verifiable.

The Question of True Decentralization

Even amid the growing popularity of decentralized alternatives, some observers have expressed skepticism about Hyperliquid’s decentralization, questioning its ability to claim it is as decentralized as it asserts.

Much of this distrust arose in March, when Hyperliquid removed a cryptocurrency from the platform after a user made a disastrous trade that forced the platform to take the position to avoid a liquidation crisis. Although Hyperliquid stated that the removal was a collective decision made by the network’s validators, industry observers suggested it shows the network is less decentralized than its advocates claim.

Similar concerns emerged when a community vote to select a “Hyperliquid-prioritized” stablecoin was questioned. Some community members argued that the Hyperliquid Foundation controls most of the staked tokens and could influence the vote outcome.

“The decentralized aspect is part of the utopian facet of financial nihilism,” says Samman. “It’s a utopian aspect that imagines a better future for financial life. I think we should also be suspicious of that, because decentralization often masks its opposite.”

Ruskin admitted that Hyperliquid is, in fact, a “team-led organization” that opts for “progressive decentralization,” which refers to starting with centralized control and gradually moving toward decentralization.

After all, in the world of cryptocurrencies, decentralization can be seen as a spectrum — and regardless of controversies, Hyperliquid is indeed more decentralized than other centralized exchanges.

Conclusion

After the FTX collapse, this distinction became important. “Suddenly, people had a real reason not to trust centralized exchanges — and it wasn’t just intellectual talk. They literally lost all that money,” says Yan. He described the moment as a “eureka,” revealing that the world was ready for decentralized finance.

The numbers clearly show that Hyperliquid has met a demand from native crypto traders. What happens next could reveal whether the public is truly ready for the world that decentralized finance is creating.