Hyperliquid: Tracking Perps Revenue on a Purpose-Built L1

2026-06-30

Hyperliquid is a Layer 1 blockchain built from scratch for high-performance on-chain trading. It is best known for its perpetual futures exchange but has since expanded into spot trading, borrowing, lending, RWAs, and a full EVM ecosystem. Unlike most DeFi protocols that deploy on Ethereum or a shared L2, Hyperliquid runs its own consensus: every trade settles natively on Hyperliquid L1, giving it the speed and depth normally only available on centralised venues while remaining fully non-custodial.

The protocol charges trading fees on every perpetual and spot trade, with tiers varying by maker/taker status and notional volume. What makes Hyperliquid's fee model unusual is where that revenue goes: 99% of perpetual trading fees (post-August 2025) flow into an Assistance Fund, which uses the money to buy back HYPE tokens. The HLP vault receives 1%, and priority order fees are burned. Stablecoin deployer yield routes 90% to the same Assistance Fund. Maker rebates and third-party builder fees are excluded entirely from protocol revenue.

Writing the adapter required decoding raw FeeCharged events emitted by the exchange contracts on each block. Maker rebates had to be subtracted from gross fee totals to arrive at the net user fees DefiLlama reports. Revenue was then split according to on-chain fee-distribution logic, with the Assistance Fund share tracked separately. The adapter had to handle the August 2025 rule change where the perp fee split shifted, requiring timestamp-based logic to apply the correct distribution at the correct block.

By any measure, Hyperliquid is one of the most profitable on-chain protocols ever built. All-time revenue crossed $1.6 billion, with $17.8 million in the seven days before this article was written and $3 million in the most recent 24-hour window. Almost none of that goes to a treasury in the traditional sense: the vast majority is recycled back into HYPE token buybacks, which is a fundamentally different value-capture model than what most DeFi protocols use.

Website: app.hyperliquid.xyz · Twitter: @HyperliquidX