Coindesk: “Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 hits record $1.2 billion in open interest.” Bloomberg: “Oil Trades are Booming on 24/7 Crypto Exchange Hyperliquid.” TradingView: “Crude oil surges to $115 on Hyperliquid as Kuwait, UAE slash production.”
HIP-3 has moved beyond a speculative narrative and into a weekend price discovery venue for oil, silver, and more major off-chain assets. But HIP-3 is not even six months old, and the 24/7 first crude oil market launched via HIP-3 is barely two months old. How did we get here, and where might HIP-3 go from here? In this brief piece, I’ll walk through the HIP-3 ecosystem as it stands today across markets, deployers, access points, coverage, etc. as well as an overview of where HIP-3 is likely to go + what further catalysts are on the horizon for HIP-3 and 24/7 traditional asset markets (aka tradfi asset perps / RWA perps) on Hyperliquid. This piece will hopefully offer some summarizing insights for the Hyperliquid-natives who have been following HIP-3 day by day since launch in mid-October 2025 as well as the HL perp newcomer who has been potentially trading oil or silver futures during market hours via a traditional exchange but has continued to hear bubblings of a 24/7 market with 15-20x leverage on the assets he wants to trade now; this pieces will be for you as well and can hopefully provide context on what is happening now around HIP-3 and Hyperliquid.
So where is HIP-3 today?
Stepping back to the essentials: HIP-3 is not an exchange, nor a blockchain, nor a pricing system. HIP-3 is a protocol for third parties to deploy perp markets on Hyperliquid’s HyperCore. Previously, only Hyperliquid Labs (as the sole validator-approved deployer) could deploy perp markets on HyperCore. With HIP-3, that window has expanded to any team able to 1) stake 500,000 HYPE (~$18m at current HYPE price) and 2) properly parameterize a market in order to avoid the slashing of that HYPE stake, which can occur by consensus of the Hyperliquid validator set of currently 25 active validators.
Becoming a deployer means securing the 500k HYPE stake, determining which markets to deploy, configuring proper price feeds for those assets + creating a methodology for how the market should operate during traditional market off hours (if launching a perp for an RWA) when your price feed is not functional, selecting a margin asset, and determining proper risk parameters for those markets (max leverage and open interest caps). These 5 steps (simplified) are done fully by the deployers with no approval/input from Hyperliquid validators, the Hyperliquid Foundation, or Hyperliquid Labs; HIP-3 is a permissionless system (an open protocol) for perp market deployment on Hyperliquid.
Who has deployed HIP-3 markets today?
There are currently 6 live HIP-3 perp market deployers since launch of HIP-3 in October 2025. These deployers are @tradexyz (focused on traditional asset markets including commodities, indices, US equities, Korean equities, and FX), @felixprotocol (focused on traditional asset markets including commodities, US equities, and indices deployed with Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin USDH as the margin asset), @Dreamcash (focused on US equities and indices deployed with USDT as the margin asset), @hyenatrade (focused on crypto perp markets deployed with USDe from Ethena as the margin asset), @markets_xyz (focused on traditional asset markets including commodities, US equities, and indices deployed with USDH as the margin asset), and @ventuals (focused on indices and pre-IPO equities like SpaceX and Anthropic).
Currently, the primary levers to pull at the deployer layer of HIP-3 are liquidity on markets deployed and stablecoin margin asset chosen at the HIP-3 DEX level. This has led to HIP-3 deployer business becoming more a game of brand, speed, and balance sheet to launch and scale markets (Launching a market via HIP-3 requires purchasing a ticker over the course of a 31 hour Dutch Auction (currently costing ~$20k), and lining up initial liquidity–which, though not required at the protocol level, is essential to see any initial traction). Deployers are beginning to focus on differentiation points like distribution areas and products on top of the markets deployed at the HIP-3 protocol level–Dreamcash is an example of this via their unique retail-focused mobile app. However, the primary distribution channel for HIP-3 markets currently remains the Hyperliquid UI (HL.xyz) and API access via Hyperliquid APIs; likely we will see this shift in the months to come. But back to where we are today–more of how HIP-3 distribution is likely to evolve later in this piece.
HIP-3 in stats
Today, since launch less than 6 months ago, HIP-3 has processed over $100bn in total volume across over 130,000 unique traders and 36m trades placed (data from @LorisTools). The most dominant markets comprising the majority of this volume have been silver and the Nasdaq100 index. For silver, as a comparison to show what this volume means, on January 30, Hyperliquid did over $3bn in volume; this is roughly 2.3% of the volume the CME did during the same period. At the time, the HIP-3 silver markets were about a month old. Research from @shaudadevens of @blockworksres showed that silver perp volumes in January 2026 made up roughly 20% of all Hyperliquid volume during that month. And per data from @messari, Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets saw $4.4b in weekend-traded volume in February while the CME and Nasdaq were closed.
But how accurate is this weekend price discovery proving to be? @0xmattegoat, a market maker on HIP-3 markets, analyzed 9 weekends across three primary markets (Gold (xyz:GOLD), Silver (xyz:SILVER), and NQ (xyz:XYZ100)) and compared their weekend returns against the corresponding CME Globex opening gap on Sunday 23:00 UTC over 9 weekends from January to February 2026. The results showed a 90% hit rate on the direction of the weekend move, with the 3 misses being small-gap weekends where the CME move was <0.05%. So these aren’t just random guesses from traders leading to no useful information at market open.
At time of writing, there is roughly $1.5bn in 24-hour crude oil perp volume via HIP-3-deployed markets. Given how early HIP-3 is, the majority of volume is still concentrated in these top markets: from March 1 to March 8, the top two HIP-3 markets composed ~90% of the volume. This leads us to where HIP-3 is going from here.
Where does HIP-3 go from here?
As more net-new traditional market traders looking to take advantage of 24/7 markets begin to take note of Hyperliquid, that concentration of markets is likely to continue to dissipate. But what needs to be done, improved, or iterated on in order to continue this scale out of the crypto/on-chain-native traders and into traditional market participants with more or, at most, much less crypto experience? Key pieces on differing timeframes that are all somewhat interconnected will be 1) portfolio margin, 2) solving the ADL dilemma, 3) deepening liquidity on HIP-3 markets substantially, 4) deploying many more markets, 5) improving weekend / off-hours pricing, and 6) furthering distribution across platforms to more traders in an effort to meet them where they are with a user experience that is familiar to them. Let’s look briefly at each of these six pieces.
Portfolio margin
Portfolio margin will be a Hyperliquid-wide upgrade that will in tandem benefit HIP-3-deployed markets significantly. Currently on HIP-3, trading mostly functions like one balance per collateral asset via DEX Abstraction mode–e.g. one balance for USDC margin, one balance for USDH margin, etc. Portfolio margin makes trading on Hyperliquid feel more like one balance sheet for the full trading account. Today traders achieve some unification within a given margin asset like mentioned above. With PM fully live (out of the current pre-alpha phase), Hyperliquid starts treating spot, perps, borrowing, and idle balances as one portfolio, which should be a signifcant UX and capital-efficiency unlock for traders looking to trade USDH, USDC, and USDT-denominated markets without having to focus on the margin asset. It also allows use of assets like BTC and HYPE as collateral for more efficiency natively embedded into HyperCore.
The ADL dilemma
For the newcomer to HIP-3 / perps at large, auto-deleveraging (ADL) is a mechanism used by perps exchanges to protect the solvency of the exchange during periods of extreme volatility and low liquidity. If an underwater position cannot be liquidated, a position on the other side of the trade is closed in order to close out the negative position and keep the system at 0 bad debt. ADLs can unfortunately be particularly common on traditional asset markets brought to Hyperliquid for 24/7 trading because of aspects like gap risk at market open as well as current relatively low liquidity and high leverage across most HIP-3 tradfi asset markets. (As a reference, over the weekend of March 7 and 8, there were $2.13m of ADLs on Felix’s OIL-USDH and $4.08m of ADLs on TradeXYZ’s CL-USDC). ADLs are unideal for the trader UX given that maximizing gains when right is as important as minimizing losses when wrong. This gain maximization often happens in the most volatile markets; with an ADL, one's gains are cut off prematurely. ADLs are likely something that will become less prevalent with time and as liquidity on the markets continues to scale as well as better 24/7 pricing with spot versions of these tradfi assets also coming onchain. There is also potential for development of an HLP-equivalent for HIP-3 markets to act as a buffer between regular liquidation and ADL. But we’ll see if this is built out. Just "doing away with the ADL" is not so straightforward, and obviously ADLs play a play key role in ensuring the solvency of the exchange, so the dilemma is how iteration should occur / whether it should be a focus or something that naturally improves as liquidity deepens and weekend pricing improves.
Deepening liquidity on HIP-3 markets
Some of the most liquid and most traded HIP-3 markets can still only handle a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars of order size at 10bps slippage (not counting fee taken on top, which is minor with Growth Mode currently enabled on most markets). Example here: for average on hour liquidity depth from March 3 to March 9, XYZ’s silver market could take $884k at 10bps; Felix’s oil market could take $67k at 10bps during the same period. These markets will need to be magnitudes deeper to support the size traders on traditional derivatives venues execute. This is something that will come with time; as more retail traders find HIP-3 markets, more non-toxic flow will be available for market makers, leading to more liquidity, which can lead to larger taker flows entering. It’s also still a specialized handful of market makers that have the capability to quote well on tradfi asset perp markets (need to have experience in both tradfi markets and crypto perps); but this is an expanding set--just in the last month, I've heard of market makers doing 10-30% of HIP-3 volumes who 3 months ago were not touching RWA perps. And lastly, like mentioned above, as 24/7 markets become more prevalent for spot versions of these assets too (likely starting on-chain), hedging during off hours will become more straightforward, which will allow for better liquidity during these periods that have, since the launch of HIP-3, been periods of significantly wider spreads leaving some markets nearly untradeable.
Deploying many more markets
This future state of HIP-3 is pretty self-explanatory, so no need to belabor the point: if HIP-3 / Hyperliquid is going to be a venue comparable to traditional asset exchanges, we need many more markets. There are currently 114 active HIP-3 markets, 91 of which are non-crypto-native / tradfi assets. Listing markets individually today is still somewhat costly with the ticker cost + cost of liquidity. Potentially in the future, we can see a faster auction period to allow for more listings (and thus likely less expensive ticker costs), but this takes time to implement and involves issues of state load on Hyperliquid L1.
Improving weekend / off-hours pricing
Currently, HIP-3 perp deployers of tradfi asset markets will configure their oracles / pricing schemas in a way that references the weighted price from a basket of offchain venues when those venues are open for trading and then switches to a self-referencing pricing model based on the last close after those traditional venues are done trading for the day / weekend / break period. This self-referencing pricing model (modeled largely on the design of the Hyperp for pre-launch token perps) allows for 24/7 activity but can cause issues like gap risks and large wicks at open of markets if that price has floated too far from what the incumbent exchanges are pricing the asset at. This is why HIP-3 deployers for tradfi assets have implemented price bands on markets during off hours that restrict price movement to a certain range during those times to avoid massive jumps, but obviously this is unideal and limiting real price discovery in certain intensely voltatile moments (like we saw around on during Marrch 7-8). As mentioned throughout this piece, one potential key upgrade here will be building usage and liquidity for spot tradfi assets on-chain, allowing for a 24/7-native hedging/reference price vehicle for oracle providers and market makers to take advantage of.
HIP-3 Distribution
And lastly as these product pieces are ironed further, we face the need for improved distribution of HIP-3 markets to non-Hyperliquid-native traders, likely more traditional derivatives traders, via interfaces and user experiences familiar to them (e.g. not requiring a funded wallet with USDC onboarded to Arbitrum from their CEX account limiting them to a max $10k deposit...). This is underway on the Hyperliquid side with a new emphasis on builder code BD, pressing further into the trade platforms where traders are already frequent users as well as on the builder side directly with certain builders working to build inroads to these communities and sharing the news with outlets like Bloomberg that disseminate the news of 24/7 markets for RWAs on Hyperliquid.
Noting $100bn total HIP-3 volume, we glance briefly into where HIP-3 has come since its launch less than 6 months ago as well as where HIP-3 can go from here to see another magnitude+ of growth. Where we go after $100bn daily volume, we will see.
