How Hyperliquid HIP-3 Works

Anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE, an amount the HIP-3 docs say is expected to fall over time. Each HIP-3 exchange, or dex, has its own order books, margining and settings, but runs on Hyperliquid's matching engine, so traders use the same account and app.

• The stake stays locked for at least 183 days after deployment and can still be slashed during the 7-day unstaking queue. Hyperliquid's September 2025 spec held it for 30 days after a dex halted (announcement), so older guides may quote that rule.
• A deployer's first three markets need no auction. Each one after that is bought in a Dutch auction shared by every HIP-3 exchange, run like HIP-1's: it lasts 31 hours, and the price, paid in HYPE, falls from twice the last winning price to a 500 HYPE floor (HIP-1 docs).

Hyperliquid runs the matching and settlement. The deployer sets everything market-specific, through the deployer actions in Hyperliquid's API:

• the oracle and mark prices, with the mark allowed to move at most 1% per update
• leverage, up to 50x, and whether a market is isolated-only or joins cross margin, which cannot be undone
• open interest caps per market, under a cap for the whole dex
• funding settings and its own fee level, which it can change at most once every 30 days
• the collateral: any token Hyperliquid accepts as a quote asset
• halting a market, which cancels orders and settles every position at the mark price

The deployer's fee is added on top of Hyperliquid's, set by a fee scale from 0 to 3 (docs). At a scale of 1, the trader pays twice Hyperliquid's base fee and the deployer keeps half; deployers keep at most 50% (fee docs).

Growth mode, added in November 2025 (announcement), cuts Hyperliquid's own fees, rebates and volume credit by 90% on markets that do not overlap the perps Hyperliquid's validators list, so no crypto and no gold. Taker fees on those markets run from 0.0045% to 0.009%, against a 0.045% base taker fee on Hyperliquid's own perps.

For a $100,000 taker order at the base fee tier:

• on one of Hyperliquid's own perps, the trader pays $45
• on a HIP-3 market at fee scale 1, the trader pays $90: $45 to Hyperliquid and $45 to the deployer
• on a HIP-3 market in growth mode at scale 1, the trader pays $9: $4.50 to each

Hyperliquid API, 14 November 2026. 6 more registered HIP-3 exchanges had no live markets. Felix, Ventuals and one of Kinetiq's two dexs were settled when the USDH stablecoin they used as collateral was wound down in June 2026, and HyENA began winding down on 31 August 2026. Markets by exchange, with prices and funding, are on Castle's onchain commodities and pre-IPO markets trackers.

• 13 October 2025: HIP-3 goes live on mainnet (announcement).
• 24 November 2025: growth mode cuts fees on new market types (announcement).
• 24 February 2026: cross margin for HIP-3 markets on mainnet (announcement).
• 20 June 2026: the USDH sunset settles the Felix, Ventuals and Kinetiq dexs that used it as collateral (announcement).
• 12 August 2026: deployers can set the fee scale per market, from 0.1 to 3 (announcement).
• 31 August 2026: HyENA begins winding down (announcement).
• 26 October 2026: HIP-3*, an optional allowlist for permissioned markets, reaches testnet. Payward, Kraken's parent, plans a CFTC-regulated deployment (announcement), as do ICE and TradeXYZ (announcement).

For traders, from the HIP-3 docs:

• The deployer runs the oracle. The docs warn that most indices are not suitable as HIP-3 price sources.
• A deployer can halt a market and settle every position at the mark price.
• Slashing punishes the deployer but compensates no one: slashed HYPE is burned, not paid to traders who lost money.
• Markets that stay isolated-only have no backstop liquidator, so losses beyond a trader's margin fall to auto-deleveraging of the winning side.
• If the collateral token loses its status as a quote asset, every dex using it is disabled, as USDH's wind-down showed in June 2026.
• A listing in the Hyperliquid app is not an endorsement of the deployer (announcement).

For deployers, slashing is decided by a stake-weighted vote of validators. The guidelines allow up to 100% of the stake for an invalid state or long downtime, 50% for brief downtime and 20% for degraded service, and intent does not matter: a compromised key counts.