Glossary
Core concepts with links to full explanations.
What Is Hyperliquid?
A visual introduction to Hyperliquid, HyperCore, HyperEVM, and HyperBFT.
HyperCore Explained
How Hyperliquid's native financial execution environment handles markets, margin, matching, and state.
HyperEVM Explained
What HyperEVM is, why it exists, and how smart contracts connect to HyperCore.
HyperBFT Explained
How Hyperliquid's consensus system orders transactions and secures HyperCore and HyperEVM.
What Happens When You Place a Trade on Hyperliquid?
Follow an order from the trading interface through consensus, matching, margin checks, and account updates.
How an Onchain Order Book Works
Bids, asks, spreads, price-time priority, and what makes Hyperliquid's native order book different from an AMM.
AMMs vs Order Books
Two ways DeFi markets discover prices, with HyperCore CLOBs and HyperEVM AMMs as concrete examples.
Spot vs Perpetual Futures
How owning an asset differs from trading perpetual exposure, including leverage, funding, and liquidation risk.
What Is a Perpetual Futures Contract?
Why perps have no expiry, how funding anchors them to spot, and where their risks come from.
Long, Short, Leverage, and Margin
The four concepts that determine how a leveraged trading position behaves.
Standard, Unified, and Portfolio Margin Accounts
How Hyperliquid's account modes decide which balances can support which positions.
Cross Margin vs Isolated Margin
How shared and ring-fenced collateral change liquidation risk on Hyperliquid.
How Liquidations Work on Hyperliquid
Maintenance margin, market liquidations, backstop liquidations, and what happens to remaining collateral.
Funding Rates on Hyperliquid
Why funding exists, who pays whom, and how Hyperliquid calculates the rate.
Mark Price vs Oracle Price vs Last Price
Why Hyperliquid uses multiple prices for trading, funding, PnL, and liquidation.
Open Interest, Volume, and Funding
How three market metrics reveal different parts of a perpetual market's positioning and activity.
Hyperliquid Order Types Explained
Market, limit, stop, take-profit, scale, TWAP, post-only, and IOC orders without the trading jargon.
Hyperliquid Fees, Makers, and Takers
How fee tiers, maker rebates, staking discounts, spot weighting, and HIP-3 deployer fees fit together.
What Are Builder Codes?
How Hyperliquid frontends and applications can charge per-order fees without taking custody of user funds.
Subaccounts and API Wallets
How professional users separate strategies and authorize automated trading on Hyperliquid.
Portfolio Margin on Hyperliquid
How Hyperliquid unifies eligible spot balances and perpetual positions into one risk-managed portfolio.
Lending, Borrowing, and Carry Trades on HyperCore
How Portfolio Margin creates borrowing demand, supply yield, and spot-perp carry strategies.
Portfolio Margin Risk and Liquidations
How Hyperliquid evaluates a whole Portfolio Margin account and why liquidation order can be non-deterministic.
HIP-1: Hyperliquid's Native Token Standard
How native spot assets are created and indexed inside HyperCore.
HIP-2 Hyperliquidity Explained
How Hyperliquid bootstraps native spot liquidity with a protocol-level automated order-book strategy.
How a Token Launches on HyperCore
From HIP-1 deployment auction to genesis balances, spot pair creation, and Hyperliquidity.
HIP-3: Builder-Deployed Perpetual Markets
How builders deploy independent perpetual DEXs while inheriting HyperCore's order books and margin engine.
HIP-3 Oracles and Market Pricing
Why a builder-deployed perpetual is only as credible as its reference price and market operations.
HIP-4 Outcome Markets Explained
How Hyperliquid's fully collateralized outcome contracts price discrete events without perpetual leverage.
Outcome Markets vs Perps vs Options
Three ways to express market views with different payoff shapes, margin systems, and settlement rules.
How HyperCore and HyperEVM Communicate
How HyperEVM smart contracts read HyperCore state through precompiles, and why that matters for DeFi composability.
CoreWriter Explained
How HyperEVM contracts can send supported actions to HyperCore and what this enables for onchain applications.
HLP and HyperCore Vaults Explained
How Hyperliquid vaults pool capital, how HLP differs from user-created vaults, and what depositors are exposed to.
HYPE Staking and Validators Explained
How HYPE delegation connects token holders to HyperBFT validators, rewards, lockups, and network security.
How the Hyperliquid Bridge Works
How assets move between external chains and Hyperliquid, and why bridging risk is separate from trading risk.
Robust Price Indices and Oracles on Hyperliquid
How Hyperliquid separates traded prices from oracle and mark prices used for funding, margin, and liquidation.
Auto-Deleveraging and Platform Solvency
What happens when a liquidation cannot be closed normally, and how Hyperliquid's ADL mechanism contains residual risk.
Building With the Hyperliquid API
A practical map of the Info API, Exchange actions, signing, and the minimum architecture for a Hyperliquid application.
WebSockets and Real-Time Hyperliquid Data
How to stream books, trades, candles, fills, and account updates without polling the API for every change.
Hyperliquid Protocol Economics and Fee Flow
Where trading fees come from, how different market types allocate them, and why protocol economics should be separated from token price narratives.
Kinetiq: Liquid Staking and Productive HYPE
How kHYPE turns native HYPE staking into a liquid DeFi asset, and how Kinetiq extends it through automated strategies.
HyperLend: The HyperEVM Money Market
How HyperLend brings pooled lending, borrowing, and leverage to HyperEVM and connects credit back to HyperCore users.
Morpho Blue on Hyperliquid: Isolated Lending Markets
How Morpho's permissionless isolated markets differ from pooled lending and HyperCore Portfolio Margin.
Valantis: stHYPE and a Purpose-Built AMM for Staked Assets
How Valantis combines liquid staking with STEX, an AMM designed around assets that can be redeemed for an underlying token.
Felix: CDPs, feUSD, and Stablecoin Credit on Hyperliquid
How Felix lets users borrow feUSD against overcollateralized positions and uses redemptions and stability pools to manage solvency.
Veda: The Vault Infrastructure Behind DeFi Yield Products
How Veda separates vault infrastructure, strategy curation, and user-facing applications across Hyperliquid DeFi.
Derive V2: Options Access From HyperEVM
How Derive connects HyperEVM collateral to an external derivatives venue for options, perps, and structured strategies.
Rysk: Fully Collateralized Options on HyperEVM
How Rysk uses covered calls, cash-secured puts, and RFQ auctions to bring volatility yield directly onchain.
Project X: Concentrated Liquidity on HyperEVM
Why an AMM can remain useful beside HyperCore's order books, and how concentrated liquidity changes capital efficiency for spot markets.
Hyperbeat: From DeFi Yield to a User-Facing Financial Account
How Hyperbeat packages Hyperliquid trading, yield, credit, and payment workflows into a higher-level financial product.
How Hyperliquid Differs From a DEX on Ethereum
Hyperliquid moves exchange-critical logic into the blockchain itself, while most Ethereum DEXs express trading logic through smart contracts on a general-purpose execution layer.
Hyperliquid vs Centralized Exchanges: What Actually Changes?
Hyperliquid can feel like a centralized exchange at the interface level, but custody, state transparency, settlement, and market operation work differently.
HyperCore vs HyperEVM: Which Layer Does What?
HyperCore is Hyperliquid's native financial engine; HyperEVM is the programmable EVM environment beside it. They share one L1 but serve different workloads.
Understanding Hyperliquid State: What Lives Where?
Hyperliquid state is split by function across HyperCore and HyperEVM, with explicit interfaces connecting native market state to EVM applications.
Blocks, Finality, Throughput, and Latency on Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid's performance should be understood as a pipeline: consensus orders state transitions, block production advances state, and user-visible latency includes network and client effects.
How Gas Works on HyperEVM vs Trading on HyperCore
HyperEVM contract calls pay HYPE gas under EVM fee mechanics; native HyperCore trading actions use Hyperliquid's trading fee and action model instead of EVM gas.
What Is HYPE and What Is It Used For?
HYPE is Hyperliquid's native asset, used across staking, validator security, HyperEVM gas, and several protocol-level deployment or alignment mechanisms.
How Spot, Perps, DeFi, and Applications Fit Into One Hyperliquid Stack
Hyperliquid combines native financial markets in HyperCore with a programmable HyperEVM application layer, allowing capital and information to move between trading and DeFi surfaces.
Hyperliquid Mainnet vs Testnet
Hyperliquid mainnet carries real assets and production market state, while testnet is the safer environment for integration work, contract testing, and API experiments.
Hyperliquid Glossary: The Terms You Need to Know
A living glossary of Hyperliquid concepts, market terms, protocol components, and developer primitives, with each definition connected to deeper Academy references.