Why Onchain Wins for Builders

Forget Hyperliquid for a minute, let’s talk about Apple. Their superpower has never been about the most complicated tech nor is it about being the first in the market.

Apple’s genius has been about making tech feel simple, intuitive, and even beautiful in its own right.

And their superpower is obsessing over getting these experiences right end-to-end, from tech to purchase to service, until everyone else looks clunky by comparison.

Hyperliquid is doing the same in web3.

While every other DEX was patching together AMMs or hiding order books off-chain, Hyperliquid asked: “what if we just… made it work onchain? Properly.”

Today, it is live: an order book that lives fully onchain. $8.9B in daily volume. 200,000 orders per second. Sub-second finality. Zero gas fees.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Apple didn’t stop at computers, they built the App Store. Hyperliquid isn’t stopping at trading either.

This blog explores the real play of Hyperliquid as a financial playground for markets, apps, and experiences, and how it matters to all of us.

What is Hyperliquid: A Plain-English Explainer

Hyperliquid is a decentralized exchange built on its own blockchain.

It runs a central limit order book completely onchain, meaning every buy order, sell order, trade, and cancellation happens transparently on the blockchain itself.

Why does that matter?

Because Hyperliquid combines the transparency and security of decentralized protocols with the speed, depth, and precision of centralized exchanges.

In short, Hyperliquid makes trading feel familiar and reliable, while still keeping it truly trustless and permissionless.

But, who is Hyperliquid competing and winning against?

A Design Choice: Order Book vs AMM vs Off-Chain

To see why Hyperliquid matters, it helps to stack it up against the two dominant DEX models: AMMs and off-chain order books.

Here’s a quick table to understand the differences:

Feature	Order Book (Hyperliquid)	AMM (Uniswap, Curve)	OffChain Books (dYdX v3, CEXs)
How It Works	Matches buy/sell orders directly onchain.	Swaps tokens against liquidity pools using math formulas.	Orders matched on centralized servers, only settled onchain.
Speed	Ultra-fast — 200k orders/sec, sub-second finality.	Instant swaps, but prices shift with trade size.	Very fast, but depends on offchain servers.
Precision	Pinpoint control over trade prices.	Limited — slippage on large trades.	High, but trust relies on centralized operators.
Transparency	Full — every order visible, verifiable onchain.	Full — pool balances are public.	Partial — matching happens offchain.
Cost	Zero gas fees on trading.	Gas fees + slippage costs (can be high).	Low fees, but potential hidden costs (MEV).
Decentralization	Fully onchain, no middleman.	Decentralized, but liquidity rules limit flexibility.	Partially centralized — censorship and operator risk.
Risks	Newer chain, evolving validator/security set.	Slippage, impermanent loss for LPs.	Hacks, censorship, front-running (MEV).
Best For	Pro traders, high-volume, precise strategies.	Casual swaps, long-tail tokens.	Traders prioritizing speed over trust.

The tradeoff Hyperliquid solves is simple: AMMs compromise on execution quality, off-chain books compromise on decentralization.

By engineering the order book to live entirely on-chain, Hyperliquid removes both compromises: unlocking speed without opacity, and trustlessness without slippage.

Solving the order book was just the first step, what makes Hyperliquid powerful is the ecosystem it’s building on top of that foundation.

The Hyperliquid Stack: Trading Meets Infrastructure

Hyperliquid runs on a dual-layer design:

HyperCore is custom L1 optimized purely for financial operations and handles 200,000 orders per second with deterministic finality.
HyperEVM is the application layer. It is Ethereum-compatible, which means developers can deploy smart contracts using familiar Solidity tools..

Most blockchains force a tradeoff: either you get a fast, specialized chain (like Solana for trading) or a flexible, general-purpose one (like Ethereum for apps).

Hyperliquid gives you both: the trading layer stays optimized for performance, while the smart contract layer can build anything on top of that liquidity.

But infrastructure alone doesn’t change the game, it’s what builders can do with it. For that enters Hyperliquid’s ‘builder-deployed markets’ model.

HIP-3: What are Builder-Deployed Markets?

HIP-3 is a proposal to let anyone deploy a perpetual-futures market directly on Hyperliquid’s core infrastructure (HyperCore) in a permissionless way. It currently is live as an MVP on testnet and intends to turn Hyperliquid into a shared infra for new perpetuals instead of each team building its own matching engine and risk stack.

Problems That HIP-3 Aims to Solve

Every exchange has the same chokepoint: who decides what gets listed?

Traditionally, it has been validators, core teams, or governance committees making subjective calls about which assets deserve markets. This creates artificial scarcity, political maneuvering, and missed opportunities for niche.

While the above is the major problem that HIP-3 aims to solve, there are also a few more bottlenecks that can be solved in the same pursuit:

Infrastructure cost & time: Building a high-performance central limit order book (CLOB), margin, liquidation engines, and the rest is very expensive and time-consuming.
Liquidity onboarding friction: Market makers face heavy integration costs for each new venue (APIs, latency, risk models). If every perp is a different stack, liquidity never flows quickly.
Oracle fragility & bespoke fixes: Oracles behave differently (weekend halts, thin markets, sessioned assets).

HIP-3 replaces gatekeepers with code so teams can ship markets as fast as they can design them while keeping quality and user safety intact through onchain rules and incentives.

How Builder-Deployed Markets (HIP-3) Works

Want to deploy a market? Stake 1 million HYPE tokens (currently ~$40M) and the market is live.

This is how simple HIP-3 makes market deployment. However, zooming in, there are a few more steps and responsibilities attached.

Permissionless deployment: Builders spin up new perp DEXs/markets directly on HyperCore.
Pay deployment gas via Dutch auction: Gas is paid in HYPE through a 31-hour network-wide Dutch auction cycle.
Stake to align incentives: Deployers must maintain 1M HYPE staked; validators can slash this stake via a stake-weighted vote for malicious operation (slashable even during the 7-day unstake queue).
Deployer responsibilities: Define oracle + contract specs, set leverage/margin, run the oracle feed, and settle/’recycle’ markets with haltTrading when needed.
Risk controls: Notional and size-based open-interest caps (per-asset and per-DEX) help bound risk.
Economics: Builders can set fees (with up to 50% fee share to the deployer).

Once live, the market gets the full Hyperliquid treatment: the same matching engine, the same liquidity infrastructure, the same sub-second settlement.

Why HIP-3 Changes the Economics

In short, HIP-3 compresses the cost structure of market creation. But, how does that change in the real market for builders and developers:

Zero Listing Fees / No Gatekeeper Premium

Traditionally, listing a new market meant paying for exchange approval (in CEXs) or waiting on governance votes (in DEXs). HIP-3 removes that overhead.

Shared Infrastructure → Lower Fixed Costs

Markets deployed under HIP-3 don’t need to bootstrap their own liquidity pools or spin up an entire exchange. They plug into HyperCore’s order book, execution, and settlement. Builders avoid the cost of designing liquidity incentives (like yield farming) or running parallel infra.

Fee Sharing as Subsidy

Builders can set trading fees and keep up to 50% of them. This effectively turns deployment costs into recoverable investments.

Risk-Control Economics

Open-interest caps and staked HYPE collateralize bad behavior and internalizes risk cheaply through stake-slash mechanics. This lowers systemic risk without expensive governance layers or lengthy audits.

User Costs Shrink Too

Traders benefit directly: no liquidity-provider spreads, no slippage, no inflated gas fees. Execution quality rises while transaction costs fall, which drives more volume into HIP-3 markets further subsidizing builders through fee revenue.

Here’s the killer advantage: Every new market strengthens the whole ecosystem. More markets mean more reasons for traders to hold HYPE, more fee generation for stakers, more use cases for the infrastructure.

Now, what new opportunities, design spaces, and products can be built?

What HIP-3 Actually Unlocks

Permissionless market deployment is a design and democracy unlock. Now, whole categories of markets that were previously gated and expensive become possible.

Here are a few concrete examples:

Index and Basket Perps: Imagine a perp that tracks ‘Top 10 RWAs,’ ‘Layer 2 tokens,’ or even a custom basket like ‘AI x DeFi plays.’ Builders can create structured exposures as liquid, tradeable markets.
Pre-IPO Price Discovery: OpenAI is worth $157 billion on paper, but only accredited investors can trade those shares. Launch an OpenAI perp and suddenly retail has price discovery for the world’s hottest AI company.
Niche Perps: Micro-niches like tokenized collectibles, cultural indices, pair perps, exotic spreads can be launched cheaply and tested without needing to build a full exchange.
Insurance markets: Permissionless launch of onchain insurance pools where traders price and transfer risk exposures, secured by standardized oracles and bond-backed deployers.
Structured products: Deploy custom payoff profiles (options, notes, spreads) directly onchain, with HyperCore handling risk, liquidity, and execution infrastructure.

HIP-3 turns Hyperliquid’s high-performance trading stack into a permissionless market factory: builders can spin up onchain perps quickly by posting a HYPE bond, picking oracles and parameters, and earning fee share, while market makers can supply liquidity with minimal extra work.

All of these opportunities become far easier when builders can plug directly into Hyperliquid’s infra and that’s where QuickNode makes it simple to get started.

Build on Hyperliquid with QuickNode

With HIP-3, launching new markets on Hyperliquid has never been easier and QuickNode makes the developer experience seamless. QuickNode already supports the network with a full suite of tools, APIs, and guides that developers can use today.

RPC Endpoints and Core RPC API: Reliable HTTP/WSS endpoints (e.g. /evm and /nanoreth) to interact with Hyperliquid: get blocks, send transactions, debug and trace.
Streams: Real-time and historical blockchain data ingestion with custom filters, useful for things like market activity monitoring.
Functions: Serverless compute to run custom logic near the chain, e.g. event filtering, reacting to onchain triggers.
Debug and Trace APIs: Using the /nanoreth path for detailed transaction traces, internal calls, gas usage, etc.
Historical Backfills: Complete historical data access for comprehensive analysis.

Outside the tools, QuickNode has also published a few developer guides to build on Hyperliquid:

Build a Real-Time Hyperliquid Whale Alert Bot
Read HyperCore Oracle Prices in HyperEVM

There is also a marketplace add-on that QuickNode offers for Hyperliquid builders: Real-time risk monitoring and liquidation analytics API for HyperLend Protocol on Hyperliquid.

Together, these resources give builders everything from RPC access to real-time event handling and offchain logic, making QuickNode the fastest path to launching apps, markets, and analytics on Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid, Order Books, HIP-3, Builder-Deployed Markets: Bringing It All Together

Hyperliquid isn’t just building a better DEX, it’s constructing the financial operating system for onchain markets. The fully onchain order book was the technical foundation. HIP-3’s permissionless market deployment is the ecosystem catalyst. The result is more than faster trades, it’s a financial playground where transparency, speed, and creativity finally coexist.

About QuickNode

QuickNode is a leading blockchain infrastructure and solutions provider. Since 2017, we’ve helped thousands of developers and companies scale their onchain applications with lightning-fast, reliable access to over 70 blockchains. Stay ahead in the world of Web3 — subscribe to our newsletter for insights, updates, and the latest innovations shaping the future!