Hyperliquid Introduces Support for Builders to Launch Perpetual Futures

The decentralized exchange Hyperliquid has announced an update allowing third parties to independently create their own perpetual swap contracts on the platform.

Effective Monday, Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3 (HIP-3) was revealed in the official Hyperliquid Discord channel. This update introduces permissionless, builder-deployed perpetual futures contracts, marking a significant move toward fully decentralized perpetual futures listings.

The implementation of HIP-3 on the DEX allows anyone staking 500,000 HYPE (approximately $20.5 million at the time of this writing) to launch their own perpetual swap contract with independent margining, order books, and parameters.

Contract deployers “can set a fee share of up to 50%” over the base fee rate and are responsible for defining the market—this includes the oracle and contract specifications—as well as its operation, like setting oracle prices, leverage limits, and any necessary settlements.

Perpetual swaps are derivative contracts that track an underlying asset’s price without an expiration date, enabling traders to maintain leveraged long or short positions indefinitely. Their pricing is kept close to the spot market through a funding rate mechanism that regularly transfers payments between longs and shorts.

Related: Centralized exchanges face allegations of significant liquidation undercounts

In Development

The minimum viable product for HIP-3 has been operational on the testnet since late September, with a network upgrade occurring on Monday to enable it on the mainnet. QuickNode, a blockchain infrastructure company, stated in its analysis that HIP-3 makes the market more adaptable to builder needs:

“HIP-3 replaces gatekeepers with code so teams can launch markets as quickly as they design them while maintaining quality and user safety through on-chain rules and incentives.”

This proposal removes listing fees typically seen on centralized exchanges, lowers fixed costs by sharing infrastructure, and allows builders to recoup costs via fee-sharing.

According to QuickNode, “Execution quality increases while transaction costs decrease, driving more volume into HIP-3 markets and further supporting builders through fee revenue.”

Related: Investigation links 100,000 BTC Hyperliquid whale to former BitForex CEO

Transforming Financial Infrastructure

Blockchain data layer Chainsight highlighted in an analysis that HIP-3 disrupts the current paradigm wherein only exchange operators can list assets. This change transforms “Hyperliquid from a single exchange into permissionless financial infrastructure.”

Chainsight anticipates this will lead to the emergence of new asset classes within decentralized finance (DeFi), as “nearly any data feed can become a tradable market.” This encompasses realized volatility, pre-IPO company valuations, traditional forex pairs, stock indexes, and exotic derivatives like correlation swaps.

The synthetic markets protocol Ventuals also plans to utilize HIP-3 to provide access to the price movements of private companies. The firm noted that “by creating perpetual futures (perps) linked to private company valuations, Ventuals enables anyone to share a perspective on the direction of companies they closely follow.”