Announced earlier this year, HIP-3 has been taking the Hyperliquid ecosystem by storm since its launch on October 13, 2025. Considered the biggest breakthrough of this fourth quarter, this update eliminates the centralized third party and allows anyone—in exchange for staking 500,000 HYPE—to create their own perpetual contracts market. A revolution that combines innovation, community, and new opportunities for builders.
Centralization at the Heart of the Problem
Before HIP-3, creating new markets on Hyperliquid depended on validators or centralized teams, who alone decided which assets could be listed. Each market required manual approval, making the process slow and opaque.
This model posed several problems:
- it contradicted the decentralized spirit of the blockchain;
- it created a barrier to entry;
- it limited the creation of innovative products such as custom indices or “exotic” markets.
Faced with these limitations, the Hyperliquid community and team designed HIP-3: a fully open and decentralized system for creating perpetual contract markets.
What is HIP-3?
At the heart of HIP-3 lies a decentralized staking and auction model. Now, anyone—whether a DAO, an individual, or an institution—can deploy a market without prior authorization by staking HYPE tokens.
The protocol uses a Dutch auction system every 31 hours via HyperCore, granting deployment rights while preventing spam. Each operator must stake nearly 500,000 HYPE (approximately $20 million) as collateral, subject to a slashing mechanism.
Slashing
This is a form of financial penalty: if an operator acts maliciously (manipulating oracles, jeopardizing the market), all or part of their stake may be confiscated by a vote of the validators. This system creates a collateral of trust, aligning the interests of market makers with those of users.
HIP-3 transforms Hyperliquid into a truly unified ecosystem, where all markets share the same engine: HyperCore. It manages the order book, matching, consensus, and liquidity. If Hyperliquid is the house, then HyperCore is its foundation.
This architecture makes all markets interoperable: they share the same liquidity and the same APIs, and enable seamless communication between products. Hyperliquid becomes an “Everything Exchange,” capable of hosting cryptocurrencies, stocks, indices, commodities, or even prediction markets.
Source: Hyperliquid Daily
Ventual: Traditional Finance Comes to HIP-3
Some projects plan to take advantage of this new freedom. Among them is Ventual, a HIP-3-based DEX. It allows users to speculate on the valuation of private startups like OpenAI or SpaceX—markets that were previously inaccessible to DeFi.
Thanks to HIP-3, Ventual has complete freedom to design its own product: collateral, fees, margins, listed assets, oracles, and even liquidation management. Everything is customizable.
Each sub-DEX built with HIP-3 thus functions as an independent exchange, with its own order book, liquidity, and economic incentives. A true toolkit for developers.
Before HIP-3, such a model would have been impossible. Traditional DeFi platforms rely on oracles limited to conventional data (cryptocurrencies, indices, commodities). This made it impossible to integrate more atypical assets, such as the valuations of private startups.
Ventual can now do this, even adapting its liquidation mechanisms to the nature of these illiquid assets. This innovation paves the way for a new generation of blockchain-based financial products that blend traditional finance and DeFi.
For the most adventurous users, an airdrop phase may be underway on its testnet: https://testnet.ventuals.com/trade
Testnet
A testnet is a trial version of a blockchain, where users can test a protocol’s features without risking real funds.
The rankings are visible in the Leaderboard tab, and the rules remain simple: generate as much volume as possible, as consistently as possible, while making a profit (positive PnL). No official date has been announced yet, but the competition is already in full swing.
It’s also possible to deposit stablecoins (USDT, USDC) into the Ventuals vault on Hyperbeat to earn points.
The Limitations and Controversies of HIP-3
Despite its ambition, HIP-3 has drawn several criticisms. With an entry fee of 500,000 HYPE, only players with significant capital—such as Framework Ventures, Ethena, or HyenaTrade—can participate. This creates a new form of centralization—economic in this case—at the expense of smaller innovators.
Deployers must manage the entire technical setup on their own: oracles, collateral, margins, security, and more. A single error can result in losses for validators or lead to unjustified slashing. Hyperliquid has, in fact, acknowledged encountering difficulties in this regard.
Finally, centralization is not entirely eliminated: it simply takes on a different form, shifting from political governance to economic control, where the wealthiest can dominate the ecosystem, regardless of the relevance or quality of the markets.
