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LearnStart here4 pages
How these docs workFoundationHow the site is organised by what you came to do, how every page runs from first principles to engineering detail, and where every fact comes from.Hyperliquid in five minutesFoundationHyperliquid is a set of financial primitives and protocols that combine into one financial system. Build a financial system from nothing, and each Hyperliquid protocol takes its place in it.The house of finance, layer by layerFoundationHyperliquid drawn as a house: one consensus, two engines joined by two bridges, an accounts layer, six financial pillars, a distribution layer that pays others to build, and Hyperliquid itself on top.Traditional finance, pillar by pillarFoundationEvery part of Hyperliquid has a traditional finance counterpart, and each analogy breaks in a specific place that shows what is actually new.
LearnFirst principles5 pages
Why Hyperliquid runs on its own chainFoundationHyperliquid built its own chain so that order books, margin and matching run fully on chain, in one consensus order, fast enough to trade on and with no off-chain book.One chain, two execution environmentsFoundationHyperCore holds the markets as native state and the HyperEVM runs contracts; one HyperBFT consensus orders both, joined by precompiles and CoreWriter.What an on-chain order book actually meansFoundationEvery order, cancel and fill is a transaction ordered by consensus and executed by every node, so the book is public chain state, not a private database.Ordering, finality and fairnessPractitionerHyperBFT gives every honest node one ordered list of committed rounds, a committed block is final, and each block runs cancels before GTC and IOC orders.HYPE: what the token doesFoundationHYPE pays HyperEVM gas, secures consensus, discounts fees, bonds deployers, backs borrowing, and is what the Assistance Fund converts fees into and burns.
LearnConsensus and validators4 pages
HyperBFTPractitionerHyperBFT is Hyperliquid's HotStuff-derived proof-of-stake consensus: stake-weighted validators commit rounds that every honest node executes in the same order.Validators and delegationPractitionerValidators run HyperBFT, ranked by stake; delegators choose them, pay commission, earn nothing while one is jailed and face no automatic slashing yet.Staking HYPE, rewards and the unstaking queueFoundationStaked HYPE is delegated to validators for compounding rewards and fee discounts; getting it back to spot takes a 7-day queue on mainnet.Running a nodeExpertA non-validating node follows consensus and writes every committed transaction, fill, order status, book change and HyperEVM block to local disk.
LearnHyperCore8 pages
HyperCore overviewFoundationHyperCore is where Hyperliquid's order books, margin, clearing and settlement run as native protocol state, applied by every validator in one order.The clearinghouse: one margin enginePractitionerHyperCore's clearinghouse holds balances and positions and checks margin on every trade; in standard mode each perp dex has its own balance and cross margin.The order book and matchingPractitionerEach HyperCore asset has one on-chain book matched in price-time priority, with cancels and post-only orders sequenced ahead of orders that take liquidity.Oracles, mark prices and robust price indicesPractitionerValidators publish perp oracle prices every 3 seconds; the mark price used for margin and liquidation is a median that no single book or venue can move.Quote assets: USDC, USDH, aligned and permissionlessPractitionerAny token can become a HyperCore quote asset if its issuer stakes 200k HYPE against a peg and liquidity standard; aligned issuers also share reserve yield.Vaults: HLP, protocol vaults, user vaultsFoundationA vault pools depositors' USDC into one HyperCore account run by one strategy; HLP is the protocol vault that makes markets and performs liquidations.Multi-sig accountsPractitionerHyperCore can make any account a native k-of-n multi-sig with no smart contract, but CoreWriter stops working for it and its HyperEVM side keeps the old key.API servers and how state reaches youPractitionerAPI servers follow a node, keep a local copy of HyperCore state, answer reads from it, and reply to a transaction only once it executes in a committed block.
LearnResearch5 pages
What one HyperEVM transaction can and cannot doExpertOne HyperEVM transaction can read HyperCore and emit a perp order and an outcome operation, but it only enqueues them, so the legs are not atomic.Options on the borrow rateExpertA research track priced the HyperCore USDC borrow rate with HIP-4 scalar bands, listed them on somebody else's perp, and found owning the perp does not pay.Composable creditExpertA research track tokenised HyperCore lending positions as HyperEVM ERC20s, proved a contract can supply on testnet, and found the vault must be a queue, not a wrapper.Collateral underwritingExpertA research track found the protocol refuses a deployer stake posted by somebody else, and rebuilt underwriting as two-of-two co-custody of the deployer's own bond.Where the chain and the docs disagreeExpertEvery place where measured behaviour on Hyperliquid contradicts the official docs: what the docs say, what was measured, the sample and the covering page.
LearnFor the press4 pages
Start here: press and analystsFoundationFor people writing about Hyperliquid: what it is, how to measure and name it correctly, and the stories behind the numbers.Measuring Hyperliquid: volume, open interest, usersFoundationPublic Hyperliquid figures disagree mostly because each counts the same fills differently; a number means something only with its rows and units.Common misconceptionsFoundationTwelve common claims about Hyperliquid that the official docs or on-chain measurement contradict, each with what is true and where it is explained.Naming and style guideFoundationWrite HyperCore, HyperEVM, HyperBFT, CoreWriter and HIP-1 to HIP-4 exactly, never shorten HyperCore to one word, and do not cite a HIP-5, because none exists.
LearnWhat Hyperliquid is and how it works
Start here
First principles
Consensus and validators
HyperCore
Research
For the press
TradeMarkets, margin and risk
Start here
Trading fundamentals
Perpetuals
Spot
Outcome markets
Accounts and credit
Advanced trading
Incentives
BuildApps, bots and contracts
Start here
Build on HyperCore
Build on the HyperEVM
DeployLaunch and run markets
Start here
The HIPs
Deploy markets
ReferenceEvery number, action and term
Look up
Protocol tables

Why Hyperliquid runs on its own chain

Foundation

Hyperliquid built its own chain so that order books, margin and matching run fully on chain, in one consensus order, fast enough to trade on and with no off-chain book.

On Hyperliquid, the markets are part of the chain itself. HyperCore holds books, margin and matching as protocol state, not as a smart contract. Every order, cancel, trade and liquidation is a transaction in one consensus order.

Take one order sent from a co-located client. It pays no gas, and the API answers in a median 0.2 s (0.9 s at the 99th percentile). The answer comes only once the order is in a committed block, so it is the executed result.

Built so the book could live on chain

Section titled “Built so the book could live on chain”

Hyperliquid Labs, a core contributor, moved from proprietary crypto market making (2020) into decentralised finance (2022). By its account, on-chain venues had poor market design, weak technology and clumsy interfaces, and trailed centralised ones by a wide margin.

Its answer was a fast chain with the order book built in. The docs call off-chain order books a crutch that HyperCore does not use.

Consensus does the operator’s job

Section titled “Consensus does the operator’s job”

Hyperliquid wrote its own consensus, HyperBFT, and its own networking stack, both tuned for end-to-end latency. HyperCore and the HyperEVM both run on it.

  • Custody stays with you. Your collateral is public chain state in a HyperCore account your key controls.
  • Anyone can reconstruct the venue. Every node executes the same transactions and writes every trade, order status and book change to disk.
  • A quorum must be honest. Safety needs more than 2/3 of stake to follow the rules, so the docs make choosing a trustworthy validator every staker’s responsibility.

Picture an exchange’s back office copied onto every validator’s machine and published as it runs. The picture breaks on who is in charge: there is no back office to overrule, only transactions a stake-weighted quorum orders and every node executes.

The numbers

Section titled “The numbers”
Property Value Context
End-to-end latency median 0.2 s, 99th percentile 0.9 s order from a geographically co-located client, from sending to a committed response
Throughput about 200,000 orders per second what mainnet supports; execution is the bottleneck
Finality 1 block “one-block finality” inherited from HyperBFT
Gas per trade 0 trading is gas-free; trading fees still apply
Commit quorum more than 2/3 of stake a round needs signatures from such a quorum
Active validators top 27 by stake running a node, validating or not, is permissionless

What it changes when you trade

Section titled “What it changes when you trade”
  • No gas is not no cost. Trading fees apply, and the first transfer into a new HyperCore account costs 1 quote token (for example 1 USDC) as an activation fee.
  • Latency covers the API server, mempool entry and consensus commit. The docs warn it is not comparable with a centralised engine’s figure.

Reading and trading from code

Section titled “Reading and trading from code”

Because markets are chain state, a HyperEVM contract under the same consensus sees the same book as every client, and can send orders into it. You can also read the venue through the API, your own node or read precompiles.

Limits of the design

Section titled “Limits of the design”
  • No automatic slashing. The docs say there is currently none, so every guarantee rests on more than 2/3 of stake being honest.
  • Throughput is capacity, not traffic.
  • The HyperEVM is throttled on purpose. It shares state with HyperCore, so it launched with lower throughput to protect the exchange. Throughput is to rise in stages.
  • Latency can be bought. Priority fees buy earlier network data and earlier sequencing of some orders. The fees are burned.

For what sits on what, see The house of finance, layer by layer. For what “every order is a transaction” means in practice, see What an on-chain order book actually means, and for the quorum itself, HyperBFT.