Perpetual Futures

Perpetual futures (perps) are the primary trading instrument on Hyperliquid. They are derivative contracts that never expire, using Funding Rates to keep prices aligned with spot.

Key Specifications

  • Assets: 100+ tradable perpetuals
  • Leverage: 3x–40x (asset-dependent)
  • Maintenance margin: Half of initial margin at max leverage (e.g., 20x leverage → 2.5% maintenance margin)
  • Order book: Full onchain order book on HyperCore, price-time priority
  • Finality: Single-block via HyperBFT

Margin Modes

See Margining for full details.

  • Cross margin (default): Shared collateral across all cross positions
  • Isolated margin: Per-position collateral, independent liquidation
  • Strict isolated: Like isolated, but margin cannot be removed manually

Funding

See Funding Rates. Hourly peer-to-peer payments. Interest rate of 0.01% per 8 hours (11.6% APR to shorts). Premium sampled every 5 seconds. Capped at 4%/hour.

Liquidation

See Liquidations. Two-stage process: market orders first, then backstop liquidation via HLP vault if equity drops below 2/3 maintenance margin.

Hyperps

See Hyperps. A special variant of perps for assets without an underlying spot market. Uses moving average mark price instead of oracle.

HIP-3: Builder-Deployed Perps

See HIP-3: Builder-Deployed Perpetuals. Third parties can deploy their own perpetual markets by staking 500,000 HYPE.