Chainfeeds Summary:
Integrating third-party Perps is mostly a low-ROI business. Whether in terms of user growth revenue, platform commission earnings, or stability investment, it is not a good business.
Article source:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/vokJbkduf5rpXf3eAubjkg
Article Author:
Fourteenth Prince
Opinion:
Fourteen: The complexity of the reserve fund is actually the most easily overlooked aspect. Hyperliquid's complexity far exceeds expectations; it's not a simple "plug and play" solution. Various platforms initially optimistically treated it as an integration of DEX, but they overlooked the fact that it's not a Lego model. If you integrate Hyperliquid, what happens if the market declines? Will the functionality remain? How many wallets are discontinuing their former inscription protocols? And will users who have discontinued their services on the platform have to go back to the official platform? Furthermore, if Hyperliquid loses popularity, perhaps Aster or Lighter will, will users migrate to the new platform? The APIs of different platforms are not entirely consistent; how can migration and parallel processing be handled? Smoothing out these issues inevitably increases the complexity of the user experience. Ultimately, if users want a comprehensive entry point, why not use the official one? Front-end integration brings a fast experience and broad coverage, but Metamask seems to have suffered a silent loss, not making much money but providing its own user traffic for free. The superior user experience provided by backend integration is currently the core reason Phantom generates the most revenue, but it also incurs significant costs. Ultimately, only they truly know the true ROI (Return on Investment). Looking back at our own experience (focusing on advanced Perps users), we prefer using platforms like Hyperliquid through the official website and primarily operate on PCs. This is mainly because we can directly access advanced features such as stop-loss/take-profit settings, chart monitoring, and margin trading. After all, this market is dominated by high-end players. The demand for mobile devices is to monitor and respond to market changes anytime, anywhere, managing position risk and prices, rather than performing complex analysis. Therefore, Phantom's advantage diminishes after the initial user experience, as its focus remains on mobile. Platforms like BasedApp, with both app and web access, cater to both needs; however, competition from the official website on the web platform limits its potential. Furthermore, Hyperliquid's own app will be launched soon, further restricting this market. In short, architectural differences determine the value of integration, but the magnitude of that value depends on the depth of integration. Ultimately, the ceiling of this model is still competition within the ecosystem, and it's difficult for users contributed by entry platforms to remain on their original platforms. Of course, many platforms are willing to accept not making money, since relying on transaction fee sharing is inherently a waste of resources. However, if they can attract users using Perps or meet the perpetual trading needs of existing users, it can be a good addition to their ecosystem. We can draw this conclusion by analyzing some data from HL on-chain, as this group is actually quite small. As shown in the chart below, each integration only contributes a few thousand daily active users, totaling less than 10,000-20,000. Moreover, looking at Hyperliquid's own monthly active users, its revenue is essentially based on a whale service model, a typical Matthew effect and inverted pyramid funding structure in the contract trading market. Currently, HL has approximately 1.1 million total wallet addresses, with 217,000 monthly active users and 50,000 daily active users. But the key is here—the top 5% of users contribute over 90% of the OI and Volume, forming a typical pyramid structure. The top 0.23% of users (with funds ranging from $1M+, totaling over 500 people) control 70% of the open interest ($5.4B), with over 100 of the top users holding an average position of $33M each, and their open interest (OI) is 920 times that of the average user.
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