What Is Hyperliquid?

Hyperliquid is a perpetual futures exchange that runs on its own blockchain. Unlike Binance or Bybit, every order, fill and liquidation settles on a public ledger — so anyone can verify what was traded, by whom, and at what price. Today it lists 635 markets and has processed $1.84T in lifetime volume.

How it differs from a centralised exchange

On Binance or Bybit, you deposit funds into the exchange's custody and trade against numbers on their screen. What you see — volume, open interest, the leaderboard — is whatever the venue chooses to publish, and it cannot be checked from outside.

Hyperliquid runs the order book itself on-chain. That has three practical consequences:

• Positions are public. Any wallet's open positions, entry prices and history can be read by anyone. This is why services like Compass can rank traders at all — see the leaderboard.
• Nothing can be quietly edited. A trader cannot disappear from the record after a bad week, and the exchange cannot curate who appears.
• You keep custody. Funds sit in your own wallet; trading is authorised by signature rather than by handing over deposits.

The trade-off is that everything is visible, including your own activity. Wallets are pseudonymous, but a wallet that becomes known stays known.

What HYPE is

HYPE is the network's own token, distributed largely through an airdrop to early users rather than a sale. It is used for fees and staking. Note that a wallet's profit and the token's price are separate things — a large "profit" figure that came from receiving an airdrop is not trading performance, which is why Compass separates the two.

What perpetuals actually are

A perpetual future is a contract that tracks an asset's price with no expiry date. Instead of settling on a date, it uses a funding rate: when more capital is long than short, longs pay shorts a small fee every few hours, and vice versa. That payment is what keeps the contract price near the spot price.

Because perpetuals are leveraged, a position that can no longer cover its margin is force-closed — a liquidation. In the last complete day $89.2M of positions were liquidated on Hyperliquid; the breakdown is on the liquidations page.

How to see what traders are doing

Because the data is public, you can look at it directly rather than take anyone's word for it. Compass rebuilds every wallet's history from settled fills: the leaderboard ranks traders by realised profit and ROI, copytrade clusters show which wallets mirror someone else's trades and what the copiers actually earned, and markets breaks activity down by token.

Common questions