Hyperliquid's performance this year has been impressive enough.

But Hyperliquid's true ambition goes far beyond this. The recently launched HIP-3 upgrade has transformed Hyperliquid from a Perp dex into another new type of composable financial Lego.

The HIP-3 ecosystem currently encompasses over 20 projects, covering multiple verticals, including trading front-ends, liquidity staking, DeFi protocols, AI infrastructure, and prediction markets. This ecosystem has a distinct characteristic: most projects are still in the testnet phase, team members often use pseudonyms, and funding is primarily self-raised, seemingly perfectly aligned with Hyperliquid's core values of rejecting venture capital.

What's most interesting about this ecosystem is that they're all trying to apply perpetual swaps to new scenarios—whether it's pre-IPO company equity, traditional stocks, commodities, computing power resources, or even yield itself. The permissionless framework provided by HIP-3 is unleashing unexpected innovation.

Although still in its early stages, several high-TVL projects, such as Kinetiq ($1.9 billion TVL), Unit ($800 million TVL), and Felix ($300 million TVL), have already demonstrated significant influence. BlackBeats has selected 16 HIP-3 ecosystem projects for introduction:

Trading front end

Based

Based is a trading superapp built on Hyperliquid and backed by Ethena Labs. It offers spot and perpetual futures trading (supporting 40x leverage), a Based Visa card, portfolio management, and an affiliate program. It also has a cool feature called Based Streams—a DEX-powered livestreaming service where creators can broadcast their trading sessions, receive token tips, and reward viewers with HyperCore.

Based launched Based Streams on October 10th, becoming the first front-end to support the HIP-3 market. It also deployed the first XYZ 100-USD index market, which saw $35 million in 24-hour trading volume. iOS and Android apps are expected to be released in mid-2025.

Liquid

Liquid is a mobile-first trading app built specifically for Hyperliquid. It offers non-custodial perpetual futures trading (up to 100x leverage), yield strategies, and curated financial news. To lower the barrier to entry, Liquid integrates email registration, simplifies wallet complexity, and makes it easy for average users to get started.

The team has professional backgrounds in AI and cryptocurrency, and extensive experience in DeFi and mobile development. The app, which launched on the App Store on August 8th, integrates Privy for instant registration and revenue generation, and is currently in public beta.

Aura

Aura is a mobile social crypto app integrated with Hyperliquid. Its core concept is to turn trading into a social activity. Users can trade with friends in real time, track each other's assets, and explore new tokens together, turning the traditional trading experience into a warm and engaging social experience.

Liquidity staking and lending

Kinetiq Exchange

Kinetiq is a liquidity staking protocol on Hyperliquid and boasts the highest TVL in the ecosystem, reaching $1.9 billion. Users who stake HYPE receive kHYPE tokens as liquidity certificates, which can be delegated to top validators via StakeHub. kHYPE can also be used as collateral for HIP-3 perpetual contracts, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for deployment.

Even more impressive is Kinetiq's Launch platform, built on HIP-3. This platform allows teams to deploy their own perpetual contract exchange without requiring significant upfront capital, simply by crowdfunding the kHYPE staking pool. Currently, Kinetiq has approximately 36 million HYPE staked, representing approximately 10% of the circulating supply.

Felix

Felix is a HyperEVM-based DeFi lending and CDP platform forked from Liquity V2. Users can borrow using assets like HYPE or uBTC as collateral, conduct peer-to-peer lending through the Vanilla market, and mint the feUSD stablecoin. Felix utilizes a variable interest rate model, providing users with flexible lending options. Its current TVL stands at $300 million.

Innovative trading products

Unit

Unit focuses on tokenizing spot assets rather than perpetual contracts, complementing the ecosystem by providing native spot liquidity for HIP-3 perpetual contracts. It is the largest deployer of spot assets on Hyperliquid and the first HIP-3 project to launch on mainnet, holding a variety of assets including BTC, ETH, and SOL.

Unit is also exploring the launch of perpetual contract markets for major US stocks like Tesla and Google through HIP-3, bringing traditional financial assets onto the blockchain. The team, comprised of members from top institutions such as HRT, Jump, and Fortress, currently boasts a TVL of $831 million.

Ventuals

Ventuals is a decentralized derivatives platform focused on perpetual futures trading for private, pre-IPO companies. Want to trade SpaceX or OpenAI equity? You can on Ventuals, supporting up to 10x leverage. The platform uses optimistic oracles and the vHYPE liquidity staking mechanism. Instead of raising venture capital, it was self-funded through the community-minted "Sekai Kappas" NFT in September 2025.

Ventuals will launch its testnet in early 2025 and will open vHYPE staking deposits on October 16th to test perpetual contracts for over ten private companies. This is the flagship project of HIP-3, extending perpetual contracts to off-chain assets for the first time and demonstrating the potential for real-world application of HIP-3.

Volmex

Volmex is bringing volatility-based products to HIP-3. It has released the BVIV/EVIV index for BTC and ETH, serving as a fear index for the crypto market (similar to the VIX index in traditional finance). Volmex plans to launch volatility perpetual contracts within Hyperliquid's Builder Markets framework, allowing traders to directly trade market volatility.

Nunchi

Nunchi is building a yield-targeted perpetual swap exchange, transforming yields and interest rate spreads into tradable perpetual derivatives. The platform offers two product categories: yield perpetuals (based on APY/interest rate) and basis perpetuals (based on price ratios). On HIP-3, Nunchi launched FR-Perpetual, a meta-market for funding rates for other perpetual contracts, focused on complementing HIP-3's staking and fee income.

Hyperbolic

Hyperbolic has launched commodity perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, using the HIP-3 standard and equipped with institutional-grade infrastructure. This allows users to trade perpetual contracts for traditional commodities like oil, gold, and natural gas, bringing physical commodities to the blockchain.

Ddot

Ddot is building a commodity exchange based on HIP-3, focusing on physical commodities and tradable real-world asset markets. Compared to Hyperbolic's financial derivatives, Ddot focuses more on the trading and circulation of commodities themselves.

Infrastructure

Global Compute Index

A real-time cloud GPU computing pricing dashboard and market index aggregates spot and on-demand prices for major GPUs (H100, H200, A100, etc.), providing daily and 30-day averages. We are also building the world's first HIP-3-based perpetual futures computing platform, acting as an oracle provider to feed aggregated price data into the permissionless perpetual market.

The core product is operational, displaying real-time spot prices. On-chain extensions are under development, including integration with Seda's oracle.

Sekai

Sekai is a Liquidity Staking Token (LST) protocol that allows anyone to easily create CoreWriter-based LST assets on the HyperEVM. Designed for HIP-3 "unicorns" (high potential deployers), it addresses the high barrier to entry of 500,000 HYPE. Companies, projects, communities, and institutions can launch their own liquidity staking tokens through Sekai, with plans to provide LST support for every HIP-3 DEX.

Flow DEX

Flow DEX is a global, compliant liquidity provider and OTC/market-making infrastructure company. It helps Hyperliquid scale, increase on-chain depth, attract institutional capital, and support token issuance across exchanges and protocols. As the ecosystem's liquidity backstop, Flow DEX plays a critical role behind the scenes.

other

Hyperbet

Hyperbet is building a decentralized casino and gambling platform on the HyperEVM, offering on-chain gambling games and a socialized gambling experience. While this field is fraught with controversy, it is indeed a promising direction for blockchain applications.

OnlyVibes

OnlyVibes is a trading community and signal-sharing group on Hyperliquid. It offers trading ideas, real-time market analysis, and trading tips to help members identify trends and manage risk. It seems more like a community of traders than a technical product.