Hyperliquid HIP-3: builder-deployed perpetuals explained

HIP-3 is the Hyperliquid upgrade that lets anyone who stakes enough HYPE deploy a perpetual futures exchange of their own on HyperCore, with their own markets, oracle and settings. These builder-deployed markets run on the same order book and margin engine as Hyperliquid's own perpetuals, which is how stock, index and commodity perpetuals came to trade next to crypto on the same chain.

This guide explains what a deployer is responsible for, what it costs, how fees, oracles and settlement work, what protects traders, and how HIP-3 markets appear on our pages.

What a builder-deployed perp is

Hyperliquid's original perpetuals are validator-operated. HIP-3, which Hyperliquid calls a key milestone towards fully decentralising the listing of perpetuals, adds markets that a deployer defines and runs. The deployer of a market is responsible for two things:¹

1. Market definition: the oracle that defines the price, and the contract specifications.
2. Market operation: setting oracle prices, leverage limits and, when needed, settling the market.

Everything else is inherited from HyperCore: the order books, the margining and the trading API. To trade a HIP-3 market, a client only sets the asset ID that belongs to it.¹ Each deployer runs one perp dex, and each dex has its own margining, order books and deployer settings.

Names follow a fixed pattern: a builder-deployed perpetual is always named {dex}:{coin}, the name of the dex, a colon and the coin.² A market called xyz:GOLD is the GOLD market of the dex called xyz.

What a deployer has to stake and pay

The main entry ticket is a stake. Hyperliquid sets the mainnet staking requirement at 500k HYPE and says it is expected to fall as the infrastructure matures. The requirement has to be kept for at least 183 days after the dex is deployed; anything staked above the current requirement can be unstaked.¹

The listing rules after that:

• One dex per deployer that meets the stake. A future upgrade may allow several dexs on the same stake.¹
• The first three assets of a dex need no auction. Every further asset goes through a Dutch auction that is shared across all perp dexs and uses the same parameters as the HIP-1 token auction.¹
• Collateral can be any quote asset. If validators later vote that an asset no longer meets the quote asset requirements, the dexs using it as collateral are disabled too.¹

Fees and growth mode

HIP-3 markets use the normal fee tiers and discounts of Hyperliquid (staking discounts, referral rewards, aligned collateral discounts). On top, the deployer can set an additional fee share between 0% and 300% (0% to 100% in growth mode); above 100%, the protocol fee is raised to match the deployer's fee. Hyperliquid states that spot and HIP-3 deployers may keep up to 50% of the trading fees their assets generate.³

Growth mode is a deployer setting that lowers the all-in fees, rebates and volume contributions of a market by at least 90%. It can only be used for markets that are entirely separate from the validator-operated perpetuals: the docs list crypto perpetuals against any collateral, crypto indexes and baskets, and gold (because a gold-tracking market already exists) as examples that do not qualify. Setting growth mode has a 30-day cooldown per asset.³

Oracle, funding and settlement

The deployer sets the oracle price of each market. The protocol allows any oracle, but the docs warn that perpetuals make the most sense on an underlying asset or data feed that is hard to manipulate and has economic meaning, and that most price indices are not suitable.¹

Funding works like on other Hyperliquid perpetuals, with one difference: HIP-3 uses a more responsive premium, the midpoint of the impact bid and ask prices relative to the oracle, so that deployers can shape funding with a funding multiplier and an interest rate.⁴

A deployer can settle a market with the haltTrading action. It cancels all orders and settles every position at the current mark price. The same action can resume trading later, which recycles the asset. The docs point out that this allows dated contracts to be listed without a new auction for each expiry.¹

What protects traders

Slashing. A deployer's stake can be slashed by a stake-weighted vote of the validators if the deployer's inputs are irregular and harm the protocol. As a guideline, inputs that cause invalid state transitions or long downtime can be slashed up to 100%, brief downtime up to 50%, and degraded performance up to 20%. Slashed HYPE is burned, not paid to affected users, and stake remains slashable during the 7-day unstaking queue.¹

Slashing is technical. It does not distinguish between a malicious deployer, a deployer that faithfully follows a poorly designed contract spec and a deployer whose keys were stolen; what counts is the effect on the protocol. Subjective misbehaviour that is valid by protocol rules is left to the application and social layers.¹

Margin modes. HIP-3 dexs can run in a "no cross" mode, isolated margin with margin removal. Enabling cross margin on an asset is irreversible, and validators only allow it for assets with enough observable liquidity, a reliable external oracle and resistance to manipulation. Whenever an asset's external price moves more than 50% against the start of the day, validators review whether the deployer should be slashed for manipulation.¹⁵

The onchain backstop. Each HIP-3 dex has its own fully onchain backstop liquidator at a system address derived from the dex index. It takes over positions that are below the backstop threshold, but only on assets with cross margin enabled; if it cannot cover a loss, the dex falls back to auto-deleveraging, which keeps the dex solvent.¹

How HIP-3 markets appear on Blockmetric

Hyperliquid publishes no asset class for HIP-3 markets, only their names and deployers. Our pages therefore handle them with a few fixed rules:

• Names without the prefix. We show a market by its coin, so xyz:TSLA appears as TSLA. The dex name is added only where a symbol would otherwise be ambiguous, for example when the same symbol trades on two dexs or as a perpetual on a centralised exchange.
• A category from a curated list. The markets screener has the chips All, Crypto and Stocks & commodities. A market is filed under Stocks & commodities only if its ticker is on our list of known stock, index, commodity, currency and rate symbols, or if its deployer lists only traditional markets. A symbol we cannot classify appears under All only; we do not guess.
• Hyperliquid only. Open interest, funding and positions of these markets come from Hyperliquid alone, and the wallets we track are polled on the HIP-3 dexs where they trade.

The same funding, open interest and liquidation rules apply to them as to every other market. For how funding is paid, see funding rates explained.

Common questions

Who lists a HIP-3 market? Its deployer, after staking the required HYPE and, for the fourth asset of a dex onwards, winning the shared Dutch auction.¹

Is a HIP-3 market the same as a Hyperliquid-listed perpetual? It uses the same order book and margin engine, but its oracle, contract specification and settlement are set by the deployer, not by the validators.¹

Can a HIP-3 market expire? Not by itself, but the deployer can settle it at the mark price with haltTrading, which can be used to run dated contracts.¹