Original article | Odaily Odaily( @OdailyChina )
Author｜Azuma ( @azuma_eth )
Amidst a persistently sluggish cryptocurrency market and shrinking liquidity, entrepreneurs in the industry are facing unprecedented pressure to break through.
However, Odaily recently learned that several startup teams have begun to see the Hyperliquid ecosystem as a breakthrough direction, hoping to help the former attract users and capture their own value by building trading front-ends, strategy platforms, AI agents, and HIP-3 custom markets (which can customize oracles, leverage limits, and settlement rules).
In the past, it seemed unimaginative to create a front-end for a DEX to drive traffic, because the market always had this inertia that what truly captures value is liquidity, the matching engine, and the underlying protocol itself, rather than the front-end windows that are attached to them.
However, as the market elevates Hyperliquid to the level of an "on-chain Nasdaq," the value and potential of this business are changing.
Odaily Note: See also "220 Days After Trade.xyz Launch, Hyperliquid is Becoming the 'New Nasdaq'"
Analogous to the traditional stock market, retail investors do not trade directly on Nasdaq or the NYSE. The real relationship with users is often built by brokerage platforms such as Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and Charles Schwab. Exchanges are responsible for providing the underlying market, liquidity, and matching capabilities, while brokerages are responsible for user access, product design, and experience optimization.
If the assumption that Hyperliquid will become the next Nasdaq holds true, then applications built on Hyperliquid that are responsible for directly connecting with users and optimizing the trading experience will no longer play the role of a simple front-end, but rather resemble "brokerages" in the traditional financial system.
Starting with HIP-3, how do these "brokerage firms" make a profit?
Before delving into these specific "brokerage" platforms, we need to briefly answer two questions. First, what is HIP-3? Second, how do these HIP-3-based projects generate profit?
First, it's important to clarify that HIP-3 projects aren't the only ones that can "start a business" around Hyperliquid. In theory, any team can build its own product based on Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and trading capabilities. Some choose to develop trading front-ends, some mobile applications, and others strategy platforms, AI agents, or asset management tools. All of these share the responsibility of driving traffic to Hyperliquid and expanding its user base.
Of all these directions, HIP-3 is the one with the most potential and already has some successful precedents. Simply put, HIP-3 allows third-party teams (Builders) to deploy perpetual contracts and operate their own trading markets based on Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and matching system.
This means that startup teams no longer need to build a new chain or a new matching system, nor do they need to bear the R&D and security costs of high-performance trading infrastructure. Instead, they can directly build the product that is closest to the user based on Hyperliquid's mature infrastructure.
In a sense, this is highly similar to the brokerage system in traditional finance. Nasdaq itself will not be responsible for providing investment advice, UI design, community operations, or strategy products for users; these tasks will ultimately be handled by brokerages such as Robinhood. Therefore, the significance of HIP-3 can be understood as further opening up the "brokerage" market space above Hyperliquid.
As for the profit model of these "brokerage firms", although some projects will generate revenue through derivative services (such as performance income from asset management and strategies), the most direct source of income for such "brokerage firms" projects is still commission sharing and the expected value-added of HYPE.
Under Hyperliquid's current mechanism, third-party deployed marketplaces will use higher transaction fees than native marketplaces, with a significant portion of these fees being returned to the deployer or front-end operator. This means that once a front-end successfully gains control of the user base, it will unlock real, continuous cash flow directly linked to transaction volume. If a front-end can achieve a daily transaction volume of billions of dollars, then transaction fee rebates alone could generate an incredibly large revenue stream.
Furthermore, Hyperliquid officially requires third parties to stake at least 500,000 HYPE tokens when deploying custom trading applications (the official statement indicates this requirement will be gradually reduced). Considering HYPE's recent strong performance and fundamentals, its appreciation potential is one of the core sources of returns for such projects.
As for the future, the issuance of tokens by the upper-level "brokerage" projects themselves will also become a potential source of revenue, which needs no further explanation.
Typical Project Review
Trade.xyz: Bringing US stocks, commodities, and indices to Hyperliquid
If you're looking for a project that best showcases the Hyperliquid ecosystem's potential, Trade.xyz is undoubtedly the top choice.
If we were to summarize Trade.xyz's mission in one sentence, it would be to "bring traditional financial market assets onto Hyperliquid." Currently, Trade.xyz has launched perpetual contracts for indices including the Nasdaq, S&P 500, gold, crude oil, and some US stocks. For crypto users, this means they can participate directly in traditional financial market price fluctuations through Hyperliquid's liquidity system without leaving the on-chain environment.
As of now, Trade.xyz holds an absolute dominant share in both open interest (OI) and daily trading volume. Real-time data from Artemis and The Block shows that it has monopolized over 90% of the current HIP-3 market.
For Hyperliquid, the significance of Trade.xyz lies in expanding the asset boundaries of its ecosystem. Many believe that whether Hyperliquid can ultimately become an "on-chain Nasdaq" depends not on the volume of trading it generates, but on its ability to become a unified trading network covering diverse asset classes, thereby accommodating new user groups and market demands.
For Trade.xyz itself, its value lies in being the first to occupy the promising track of on-chain traditional financial asset trading. To this day, Trade.xyz's explosive trading volume and revenue figures have proven the platform's strategic success.
Dreamcash: The Capturer of Mobile Traffic
If Trade.xyz aims to expand Hyperliquid's asset boundaries, then Dreamcash focuses on user boundaries.
For a long time, cryptocurrency trading products have shared a common problem—they are often designed for professional traders. Complex on-chain operations, obscure technical jargon, and high barriers to entry in fund management have kept a large number of potential users out. Even platforms like Hyperliquid, which already offer a remarkably good trading experience, still primarily serve native cryptocurrency traders.
Dreamcash aims to solve this very problem. Unlike many products that emphasize trading functionality, Dreamcash is more like a trading app for the mobile internet era. The project team has invested heavily in the mobile experience, the points incentive system, and user growth mechanisms, hoping to lower the barrier for ordinary users to access on-chain trading through a more lightweight and gamified product design. Users can simply log in with their email or social media account and leverage cryptocurrencies or global macro assets with a single click, just like buying and selling stocks, within seconds.
As of this writing, Dreamcash has been downloaded more than 100,000 times on both iOS and Android platforms.
Ventuals: Pre-IPO Market Pioneers
Instead of focusing on mainstream assets in the market, Ventuals has set its sights on the most inaccessible area of the traditional financial system – primary market private equity.
In traditional financial markets, the equity subscription of highly imaginative tech unicorns such as OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic is often monopolized by top investment banks and multi-billion dollar funds. Retail investors not only lack entry barriers but also face extremely long lock-up periods and very poor liquidity. The core logic of Ventuals is to leverage the HIP-3 feature, which allows for customizable clearing and settlement rules, to package the pre-IPO equity of these unlisted companies into on-chain perpetual contracts, allowing global retail investors to directly participate in the long-short game of valuation before these unicorns officially go public.
One of the key reasons why Nasdaq has become one of the world's most important capital markets is that it has consistently met the financing and pricing needs of new economy companies. What Ventures is trying to do is something similar to some extent—to enable on-chain markets to not only trade existing assets, but also to provide a price discovery mechanism for future assets.
Of course, this direction is still a long way from maturity, but it is already one of the most noteworthy evolutionary directions in the on-chain capital market.
Based on: The next stop, "Super App"
Based's goal is to build a crypto "super app" that covers scenarios of trading, prediction markets, payments, and consumption.
Currently, Based offers trading terminals on web, desktop, and mobile (iOS and Android) platforms. Through Based, users can trade spot and perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, access prediction markets through Polymarket, and make cryptocurrency purchases in the real world using Based Visa.
Following the implementation of HIP-3, Based has taken another step forward beyond simply integrating the Hyperliquid frontend—collaborating with Ethena to launch HyENA, a custom trading protocol based on Hyperliquid. Unlike other HIP-3 projects that primarily focus on innovation around trading instruments, HyENA focuses on the margin itself. This protocol introduces a margin system centered on a yield-generating stablecoin (USDe), aiming to allow users to generate continuous returns on idle margin while trading.
In a sense, this is more like introducing the logic of money market funds from traditional financial markets into on-chain trading scenarios. In traditional brokerage systems, idle funds in customer accounts are often automatically allocated to money market funds to improve capital utilization efficiency. HyENA's attempt is to reconstruct this experience in an on-chain environment.
Minara AI: When Agents Become Users
While projects like Trade.xyz, Dreamcash, and Based are still vying for human user access points, Minara AI represents a more futuristic direction – the Agent access point.
Minara's core product is an AI-driven financial execution layer. Users can directly issue trading instructions to AI tools such as Claude and Cursor via natural language, and Minara will then utilize Hyperliquid's underlying trading capabilities to complete operations such as opening and closing positions and managing leverage. In other words, Minara envisions that in the future, the person directly using the trading interface may no longer be a human, but rather an AI agent configured by the user.
In a sense, this is not just limited to the Hyperliquid ecosystem, but is one of the most noteworthy trends in the entire internet world.
The open combination of relationships has created Hyperliquid's strongest competitive advantage.
As more and more teams choose to build their upper-layer applications on Hyperliquid, a more industry-specific question is being considered by more and more people: what does this combination of Hyperliquid and these on-chain "brokers" really mean for the competition in the exchange sector?
In the past, most people's understanding of exchanges was still limited to "product trading." The competition was about who had the better UI, who could list more coins, who had lower transaction fees, and who could attract more users.
But Hyperliquid is pushing the competition in a completely different direction. More and more market participants are beginning to realize that what Hyperliquid wants to do is not the user-facing trading platform we are familiar with, but a financial infrastructure that can be directly called by APIs, programs, and even AI systems, and then the upper-level "brokerages" built on this foundation will connect with users.
In a sense, this is very similar to the evolutionary path of software under the AI wave. In the traditional internet era, products competed on UI, entry points, and user time; but in the AI era, more and more products are beginning to degenerate into "capability layers"—APIs themselves are becoming new traffic entry points.
This is the new evolutionary direction that Hyperliquid is leading. For this reason, more and more practitioners are beginning to understand Hyperliquid as a "financial operating system," which only needs to be responsible for unifying capabilities at the underlying level, while the upper-level "brokerages" will be responsible for creating specific scenarios.
Once this structure is established, a strong symbiotic relationship will form between Hyperliquid and these upper-layer "brokers." For Hyperliquid, each additional upper-layer application represents a new traffic entry point, a new user channel, and a new trading scenario. The protocol itself doesn't need to operate these products itself, yet it can continuously share transaction fees and expand the overall network's liquidity depth. For these upper-layer applications, they are highly dependent on the liquidity, matching efficiency, and on-chain trading experience already established by Hyperliquid. They don't need to create new chains, rebuild order books, or re-start liquidity; they only need to do two things: bring in users and keep them engaged.
This means that future competition may no longer be between one exchange and another, but may gradually evolve into competition between different financial networks. As more and more applications, agents, and trading portals choose to build on the same liquidity network, the network itself will generate an increasingly strong attraction effect. The platforms that successfully gather the most developers, applications, and user portals will also possess the deepest liquidity and the broadest market coverage.
Perhaps this is Hyperliquid's strongest competitive advantage and the most imaginative aspect of the new Nasdaq.
