Hyperliquid
6.2/10 total
A perpetuals exchange running as its own L1 with a fully on-chain central limit order book, which gives CEX-like fills at 0.045% base taker while you keep your own keys. Marked caution for a documented governance intervention: on 26 March 2025 an attacker manipulated JELLY spot markets to distort the oracle and force the HLP backstop vault into around $12M of unrealised loss, and the validator set voted within about two minutes to override the JELLY oracle price, force-settle all positions at $0.0095 and delist the market.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- No account, no email, no identity verification: you trade by signing with your wallet
- Base taker fee of 0.045% on perps is competitive with large centralised venues, and maker rebates reach 0% at high volume
- Order book and every position are fully on-chain, so open interest, funding and liquidation levels are independently auditable
- Public REST and WebSocket API with no key issuance, so programmatic trading needs only a funded wallet
- Made non-flagged users whole from Hyper Foundation funds after the March 2025 JELLY incident rather than socialising the loss
Against
- March 2025 JELLY intervention: the validator set voted to ignore the market oracle and force-settle positions at $0.0095 against a roughly $0.50 external price. No user lost funds, but it is a concrete precedent that a small validator set can rewrite settlement terms in minutes
- Terms of Use define US and Ontario residents as Restricted Persons, the front end geofences by IP, and the terms specifically prohibit VPNs and misrepresenting residency
- Deposits cross a bridge contract secured by the validator set, so your funds depend on that set's honesty and liveness in a way an AMM swap does not
- The core exchange and consensus code is not open source; only a non-validator node binary is published, so the matching engine cannot be independently reviewed
- Every order, fill, position and liquidation is publicly attributable to your address in real time, which is worse for privacy than a one-off AMM swap; no onion service and no no-JavaScript path
Agent access 10/10
Documented public REST and WebSocket API where every action is authenticated by wallet signature, with no account creation and no API key issuance. An agent with a funded wallet can discover markets, quote and trade unattended.
Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.
Fees
0.045% taker / 0.015% maker (base perps)
Fees are tiered on rolling 14-day weighted volume, computed as 14d perps volume plus twice 14d spot volume. Perps run from 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker at base down to 0.024% taker and 0% maker above roughly $7B. Spot starts at 0.070% taker and 0.040% maker, falling to 0.025% taker and 0% maker. Staking HYPE cuts fees by 5% at 10 HYPE up to 40% above 500,000 HYPE, and pairs between two quote assets get 80% lower taker fees.
Specification
- Type
- On-chain DEX
- KYC policy
- No KYC
- Custody model
- onchain
- Account required
- no
- Assets
- perp and spot markets, low hundreds
- Chains
- own L1; deposits via Arbitrum
- Operating since
- 2023
- Jurisdiction
- undisclosed
- Onion service
- no
- Works without JS
- no
- Open source
- no
- Facts checked
- 2026-07-31
Links
Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.