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Hyperliquid, the decentralised perpetual futures exchange founded by former Hudson River Trading quantitative trader Jeff Yan, has emerged as the go-to venue for a growing number of traditional finance professionals trading outside regulated market hours, the Wall Street Journal reported on 2 June.
The platform runs continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and offers perpetual futures contracts tied to a wide range of assets — Bitcoin, the S&P 500, crude oil, and pre-IPO companies including SpaceX. According to Hyperdash, an analytics platform built on Hyperliquid's blockchain, cumulative trading volume in SpaceX-linked perpetuals has reached around $280 million. The S&P 500-linked contracts were made possible after S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the index to Trade[XYZ], which built them as some of the exchange's most active traditional-asset products.
The WSJ cited hedge fund commodity trader Vala Zeinali as one example of how the platform is being used. When Trump announced airstrikes on Iran on a Saturday in February, Zeinali was already long oil derivatives on Hyperliquid. He closed most of his position as crude prices surged, locking in a gain of up to 243% – a trade he said would have been impossible to execute through traditional futures markets, where the window between the announcement and Sunday's open would have been too narrow.
Hyperliquid was built partly in response to the collapse of FTX. Yan has said the exchange's core design principle is that users, not the platform, hold their own assets. Unlike centralised exchanges, Hyperliquid runs its order books and trade matching entirely onchain, on its own layer-1 blockchain.
The platform has generated significant revenue from that structure. According to Blockworks Research data cited by the WSJ, the Hyperliquid blockchain and exchange together produced approximately $8 billion in total revenue last year. The native token HYPE, launched in late 2024, is trading at around $71 as of 3 June — up more than 100% over the past year — and hit an all-time high of $75.51 on 2 June. Market capitalisation stands at approximately $16 billion.
Hyperliquid currently blocks US residents from using the platform, and its terms of use explicitly prohibit circumvention including via VPN. The WSJ reported that some traders in restricted regions access it anyway, drawn in part by the absence of identity verification requirements. That picture may be changing. Last Friday, the CFTC outlined a framework allowing registered US platforms to offer perpetual futures, and separately approved Kalshi to list Bitcoin perpetual futures and granted Coinbase's US customers access to its global perpetual futures via an affiliate. Whether that regulatory opening extends to a platform like Hyperliquid, which operates outside the US registration framework, remains an open question.
The next items on Hyperliquid's product roadmap are prediction markets and options trading. Its first Bitcoin-price outcome contracts launched in early May and have already generated millions in derivative volume, according to the WSJ.
