About Hyperliquid
What is Hyperliquid?
Explain Like I'm 5:
Hyperliquid is like a super-fast playground where grown-ups can trade digital money and assets. It's built to be really quick and fair, so everyone can trade without waiting or worrying about cheating.
Hyperliquid is a performant blockchain built with the vision of a fully onchain open financial system. Liquidity, user applications, and trading activity synergize on a unified platform that will ultimately house all of finance.
Technical Overview
Explain Like I'm 5:
Hyperliquid has two main parts: HyperCore (the trading part) and HyperEVM (the building part). HyperCore is super fast and can handle 200,000 trades every second! HyperEVM lets people build their own special trading tools on top of Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid is a layer one blockchain (L1) written and optimized from first principles. It uses a custom consensus algorithm called HyperBFT inspired by Hotstuff and its successors. Both the algorithm and networking stack are optimized from the ground up to support the unique demands of the L1.
Hyperliquid state execution is split into two broad components:
HyperCore
Includes fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books. Every order, cancel, trade, and liquidation happens transparently with one-block finality. HyperCore currently supports 200k orders per second.
HyperEVM
Brings the familiar general-purpose smart contract platform pioneered by Ethereum to the Hyperliquid blockchain. The performant liquidity and financial primitives of HyperCore are available as permissionless building blocks for all users and builders.
Core Contributors
Explain Like I'm 5:
Hyperliquid was built by a team of really smart people who used to trade digital money themselves. They saw problems with how trading worked and decided to build something better.
Hyperliquid Labs is a core contributor supporting the growth of Hyperliquid, led by Jeff and iliensinc, who are classmates from Harvard. Other members of the team are from Caltech and MIT and previously worked at Airtable, Citadel, Hudson River Trading, and Nuro.
The team used to do proprietary market making in crypto in 2020 and expanded into defi in the summer of 2022. Existing platforms were plagued with issues, such as poor market design, bad tech, and clunky UX. It was easy to make money trading on these protocols, but disappointing to see how far behind defi was compared to its centralized counterparts.
The team set out to build a product that could solve these issues and provide users with a seamless trading experience. Designing a performant decentralized L1 with an order book DEX built-in requires an intimate understanding of quantitative trading, cutting-edge blockchain technology, and clean UX, which the team is well-positioned to deliver.
Did You Know?
Hyperliquid Labs is self-funded and has not taken any external capital, which allows the team to focus on building a product they believe in without external pressure.