Hyperliquid now offers 24/7 trading of stock-like exposure through “equity perps” that mirror real share prices on-chain. The venue says it books about thirty million dollars in deals each day and handles seventy to eighty per cent of such activity. This nonstop model blends ordinary share law with unregulated crypto infrastructure, leaving traders, custodians and compliance teams scrambling.
The project by Hyperliquid runs its own high-speed chain, similar to Ethereum, built for sub-second finality. Blocks finish in under a second while the order book claims it can match two million transactions and two hundred thousand orders each second. Users pay no gas fees, can use up to fifty times leverage and face deep liquidity, combining speed and capital efficiency in a single venue.
After the HIP-3 code change in October 2025, anyone who locks five hundred thousand HYPE tokens can list a new contract within minutes. Tokenized Nasdaq baskets soon sat among the ten busiest markets. But the record includes sharp setbacks—an ETH-market exploit, a seven-hundred-and-eighty-two-thousand-dollar “Hyperdrive” drain, wallet hacks that stole twenty one million in one case, and an XPL price glitch that moved forty six million off fair value. These events expose weak spots: too few validators and a need for outside custodians or special purpose vehicles to keep tokens aligned with real shares.
Design, performance and listing dynamics
A “perpetual” is a future that never matures—its price stays in step with the real asset through small daily payments between long and short holders. This mechanism keeps equity perps near their reference stocks while enabling round-the-clock trading.
Liquidity and access matter because trades run every minute and the contracts can serve as collateral elsewhere in DeFi. This opens continuous entry and exit points alongside composability with other protocols.
Technical risk remains high: bugs, slippage and a handful of validators can trigger sudden loss or manipulation. Past exploits and price dislocations show how code paths and matching logic can deviate from fair value in stressful moments.
Legal risk is unresolved since no regulator has ruled these tokens are not securities. They already attract Howey-test questions and SEC attention, raising the chance of future enforcement or reclassification.
Central choke points—custodians, SPVs and price oracles—can fail or misreport, snapping the peg to the underlying share. Keeping tokens in line with real equities depends on third parties that may break, lie or get censored.
The next big task is to replace fragile custody and oracle models with sturdier ones or to spread control across more validators. Until that happens, institutions must decide whether the reward of nonstop trading outweighs the clear dangers of hacks, false prices and sudden rule changes.
