Hyperliquid
A look at Hyperliquid, one of this cycle's biggest success stories.
TLDR:
Hyperliquid is one of this cycle’s biggest successes, the HYPE coin is a top 10 coin at $44bn FDV and their exchange is one of DeFi’s top revenue generators.
It has a high-performance EVM-based L1 blockchain and a built in perpetuals exchange. This is split under two layers known as HyperCore and HyperEVM.
HyperCore has all the modules needed to run the exchange, while HyperEVM is a permissionless chain with lots of protocols already being built on it.
Below I show a little bit about both how to use their exchange and how to bridge money into the HyperEVM for you to try some of their apps out.
The HYPE airdrop was one of the largest of this cycle and it’s been steadily rising since. There’s a strong chance another big airdrop will come in the future.
One of the biggest success stories this cycle has been Hyperliquid. They are currently one of the biggest revenue generating projects in crypto, generating $70m alone in the past 30 days, and their HYPE token has become one of the top 10 largest coins by FDV in the space!
So today I decided to dive into the HyperLiquid ecosystem to explain what they are and look at how they’ve risen from complete obscurity to the top.
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HyperLiquid
HyperLiquid’s been one of this cycle’s biggest winners. It’s come from complete obscurity to having its HYPE coin become a top 15 coin based market cap and a top 10 coin when taking it’s “fully diluted value” into consideration (ie. its market cap including coins not yet in circulation) with a $44bn FDV!
Not only is HYPE one of the fastest growing coins of all time in crypto, Hyperliquid is also one of the biggest revenue generating projects in the space. It regularly shows up in my DeFi Daily posts right behind Tether and Circle stablecoins as the 3rd largest revenue generator.
It is of course no small feat to regularly make $3-4m+ in revenue per day!
Hyperliquid has fast cemented itself as one of the largest and most respected projects in the space, and it’s entirely DeFi native.
But what is Hyperliquid exactly?
In their own words they are “The blockchain to house all finance”, in other words they are an L1 blockchain focused on crypto-native financial applications.
More specifically they are a high performance L1 blockchain that uses the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) through their HyperEVM and HyperCore layers, plus they have their own perpetuals exchange protocol which is their first big app built on top of their L1 that specifically uses the building blocks provided in their HyperCore.
Therefore Hyperliquid are a great example of what’s called an “appchain”, ie. an app with it’s own blockchain. By having their own chain they have both more control of the underlying tech and can optimise it to improve UX and performance of their app, plus it means they have a permissionless chain in its own right for others to build on.
Its Hyperliquid’s perpetuals exchange app that’s become such a huge revenue generator for them, and keeps going from strength to strength.
Perpetuals Exchange
Hyperliquid’s perpetuals exchange acts just like any other perps exchange in crypto. I’ve written about perpetuals and leverage before in the post below, but if you’re not sure what they are they essentially allow people to bet on the direction of movement of an asset’s price.
So for example if you think Bitcoin’s going up in price you can bet that it’ll go up through the exchange without holding any Bitcoin itself. What makes perps powerful is the ability to apply leverage, which means you can bet on the price going up with 10x leverage, so if it goes up by 10% you get a 100% return!
However, when leverage is applied if the price goes in the opposite direction that you bet then you also experience 10x losses and you can see your entire position wiped out!
Therefore perpetuals are a bit like gambling in a casino and I don’t really recommend it for most people!
Yet there are still people who like doing so and Hyperliquid provides a slick interface to access perpetuals in a totally decentralised way, and therefore as I mentioned earlier they’ve been racking up lots of revenue with it.
To use the exchange is pretty simple, you just select the “Deposit” button on the top right and then the amount of USDC you want to send in on the Arbitrum chain. Note that they also support Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin deposits.
Their perps exchange is just like any other one and already has many pairs of coins listed, although there’s still hundreds of top coins that are yet to list. I recommend reading my previous post that I shared above on perpetuals if you want to understand more about how to use a perps exchange.
Beyond the perps exchange, they also offer lending vaults with their signature HLP earning over 8%, staking options on HYPE earning around 2%, a referral system, a leaderboard showing the most successful traders, and a lot more! It’s worth exploring if you like this sort of thing.
HyperEVM
The beauty of Hyperliquid having its own permissionless blockchain is that others can build on top of it and provide value that goes beyond it’s perps exchange, and there’s already lots of protocols being built on it!
To try out the HyperEVM I recommend bridging from another EVM wallet into your HyperEVM account with Relay.link, which I’ve written about before if you’re not familiar with it.
All you need to do is select the currency you’re going from to the one you’re going to. In this case I’m going from ETH on Ethereum to HYPE on HyperEVM. Note that this operation can take a little while, it took about 10 minutes for it to complete for me.
You can also transfer to the HyperEVM from within Hyperliquid’s app by depositing and then selecting the “Transfer to/from EVM” button, which will give you a box allowing you to transfer like this.
Once you’ve got HYPE on HyperEVM you can then explore around a bunch of different protocols to have a play with the ecosystem. PixOnChain wrote a guide on how he’s farming points with the HyperEVM as he believes there’ll be future HYPE airdrops.
Specifically he suggests this playbook below that essentially farms yield and points on several protocols in the HyperEVM.
Whether you decide to do the strategy above or not, I do recommend at least going to HyperBeat and HyperSwap to see how a couple of apps in this ecosystem work. Note that you may need to add HyperEVM to your wallet to see your HYPE balance, which you can easily do at chainlist.org/chain/999.
HyperBeat is somewhat of a Curve or Aave clone that allows you to lend and borrow, as well as offering some staking vaults.
Meanwhile HyperSwap is a Uniswap-like AMM that allows you to swap between different tokens in the HyperEVM.
Hype Airdrop
The HYPE token is a success story in its own right because the team was entirely self-funded by the founders, and so when they did their initial airdrop at the tail-end of 2024 there were no investor unlocks, which has helped the token be on a steady rise ever since!
The initial airdrop distributed 31% of the token supply as shown below, but importantly at the moment of the airdrop they also posted that around 39% of the overall token supply will be used for “future emissions and community rewards”.
So although HYPE’s already dropped a huge airdrop, there’s still the potential for a much bigger airdrop to come since they still have many more tokens to distribute and the valuation is much higher now!
So if you want a chance to get in on their airdop then I recommend using the HyperEVM as in PixOnChain’s post I mentioned above.
Right now it’s a little awkward to get onto the EVM and try out these protocols, which can be a good thing as Zeneca mentioned in his own post about Hyperliquid: “as a general rule, the more friction there is to get involved with an ecosystem, the fewer people will do it, and the greater the rewards will be for those that do.”
Airdrop or not, you’re now all clued up about one of the most successful new projects in crypto this past cycle. It’s exciting to see real revenue generating projects rising to the top in the crypto space, I think this is a sign that the space is maturing and I hope it will become a growing trend.
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