On February 13th, Hyperliquid officially announced that the cross-margin feature for the HIP-3 permissionless perpetual contract market was officially enabled on the testnet , but not yet available on the mainnet. However, this feature meets the requirements for the mainnet level bug bounty program, meaning that Hyperliquid is making final preparations for mainnet deployment.
HIP-3 is a major upgrade launched by Hyperliquid in October 2025, allowing anyone to deploy their own perpetual contract market on the platform by staking 500,000 HYPE tokens. Since its launch, HIP-3 has accumulated over $10 billion in trading volume.
According to the official documentation, HIP-3 deployers must first enable cross-margin functionality for a specific asset before users can use that asset for cross-margin trading.
"Protective cross-margin"
The biggest highlight of this cross-margin mechanism is its "protected cross margin" design.
Under a unified account, all cross-margin perpetual contracts using the same collateral can share margin , even across multiple DEXs. This means users no longer need to deposit margin separately for each DEX, significantly improving capital efficiency.
However, shared margin is often accompanied by concerns about risk contagion. If an asset on a DEX fluctuates wildly, will it drag down other positions? Hyperliquid's answer is: no .
Assets on different DEXs will be protected up to their maintenance margin levels to avoid automatic liquidation (ADL) caused by large price fluctuations on other DEXs.
But whether it will actually happen or not still needs to be "experienced" in practice.
DEX abstract interface not applicable
It is worth noting that Hyperliquid also specifically pointed out that the cross margin function was not designed for the DEX Abstraction interface , and the relevant interface should not allow cross margin to be used through DEX Abstraction trading.
To use the cross-margin functionality of HIP-3 assets, users should operate through a Unified Account or Portfolio Margin to obtain the desired cross-margin behavior.
