Hyperliquid DEX buying and selling volumes lower into CEX market share: Knowledge

Hyperliquid is among the present bull market’s standout DeFi success tales. With each day buying and selling volumes having reached $4 billion, the alternate has turn into the most important decentralized (DEX) derivatives platform, commanding almost 60% of the market.

Hyperliquid nonetheless lags far behind Binance Futures’ $50 billion each day common quantity, however the pattern means that it has began to encroach on centralized alternate (CEX) territory.

What’s behind Hyperliquid’s parabolic rise?

Launched in 2023, Hyperliquid gained recognition in April 2024 after launching spot buying and selling. This, mixed with its aggressive itemizing technique and easy-to-use onchain consumer interface, helped to lure in a wave of recent customers.

The platform’s actual explosion, nonetheless, got here in November 2024, following the launch of its HYPE (HYPE) token. Hyperliquid’s buying and selling quantity skyrocketed, and it now boasts over 400,000 customers and greater than 50 billion trades processed, in line with knowledge from Dune.

Whereas Hyperliquid began as a high-performance perpetual futures and spot DEX, its ambitions have since expanded. With the launch of HyperEVM on Feb. 18, the undertaking has turn into a general-purpose layer-1 chain able to supporting third-party DeFi apps constructed on high of its infrastructure. 

As one in all Hyperliquid’s founders, Jeff Yan, put it, 

“Most L1s construct infrastructure and hope that others will come construct the killer apps. Hyperliquid takes the other method: polish a local utility after which develop into general-purpose infrastructure.”

If this method works, the liquidity pushed by Hyperliquid’s core DEX may naturally feed into the broader ecosystem and vice versa, making a flywheel impact.

Associated: Hyperliquid flips Solana in fees, but is the ‘HYPE’ justified?

Will Hyperliquid turn into a sustainable CEX various?

In accordance with CoinGecko, Hyperliquid now ranks 14th amongst derivatives exchanges by open curiosity, sitting at $3.1 billion. That’s nonetheless behind Binance’s $22 billion however forward of older names like Deribit or derivatives divisions of Crypto.com, BitMEX, or KuCoin. It’s the primary time a DEX is competing so carefully with established CEXs.

Moreover, as Hyperliquid deepens its deal with specialised buying and selling pairs, it continues to chip away on the market share of main exchanges. The DEX accepts not solely Arbitrum USDC as collateral but in addition native BTC. This makes it one of many few decentralized platforms that deal with BTC wrapping and unwrapping natively, giving customers the choice to make use of BTC for Web3-wallet-based buying and selling.

X consumer Skewga.hl noted that Hyperliquid’s BTC perpetual futures quantity share not too long ago hit an all-time excessive, reaching nearly 50% of Bybit’s and 21% of Binance’s. Skewga.hl wrote,

“No DEX has ever come this near matching Tier 1 CEX quantity.” 

Since 2024, perpetual swaps have seen a revival as a buying and selling software. In the course of the 2021–2022 bull market, each day perps quantity averaged round $5 billion. In early 2025, that quantity typically exceeded $15 billion, with Hyperliquid accounting for almost two-thirds of it.

Knowledge from DefiLlama illustrates the shift: whereas dYdX (inexperienced) dominated in 2023–2024, the panorama diversified considerably in 2024—and by 2025, Hyperliquid (pink) had taken the lead.

Regardless of the latest JELLY token scandal, which concerned the alternate halting buying and selling and delisting a low-market-cap token {that a} whale had exploited, Hyperliquid stays a preferred alternate amongst DeFi and DEX merchants. It has but to seize institutional investor flows or scale to the extent of top-tier CEXs. Nonetheless, if its layer 1 ecosystem features traction with builders, Hyperliquid may evolve into greater than only a main DEX.