If Hyperliquid is the new Nasdaq, which projects are acting as brokerages?

Original: Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Amidst persistently sluggish crypto market conditions and shrinking liquidity, entrepreneurs in the industry are facing unprecedented pressure to break new ground.

However, Odaily has recently learned that multiple entrepreneurial teams have begun to view the Hyperliquid ecosystem as a direction for breakthrough, hoping to attract users to the platform while capturing their own value by building trading front-ends, strategy platforms, AI Agents, and HIP-3 custom markets (which allow customization of oracles, leverage limits, and settlement rules).

In the past, building a front-end to attract users for a specific DEX seemed unimaginative, as the market often held the inertia-driven belief that value is truly captured by the liquidity, matching engine, and underlying protocol itself, not by the front-end windows attached to them.

But as the market elevates Hyperliquid's positioning to the level of an "on-chain Nasdaq," the value and potential of this business model are also changing.

Note from Odaily: Refer to "220 Days After Trade.xyz Launch, Hyperliquid is Becoming the 'New Nasdaq'"

Analogous to the traditional stock market, retail investors don't trade directly on the Nasdaq or NYSE. The entities that truly build relationships with users are brokerage platforms like Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and Charles Schwab. The exchange provides the underlying market, liquidity, and matching engine; the brokers are responsible for the user interface, product design, and experience optimization.

If the hypothesis that Hyperliquid becomes a new-generation Nasdaq holds true, then the applications built on top of Hyperliquid – those responsible for directly interfacing with users and optimizing the trading experience – are no longer simple front-ends. Their role is more akin to "brokerages" in the traditional financial system.

Starting with HIP-3: How Do These "Brokerages" Profit?

Before understanding these specific "brokerage" platforms, we need to briefly answer two questions. First, what is HIP-3? Second, how can projects based on HIP-3 generate profit?

First, it's important to note that not only HIP-3 projects can "start a business" around Hyperliquid. Theoretically, any team can build their own product based on Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and trading capabilities. Some choose to build trading front-ends, some mobile applications, and others strategy platforms, AI Agents, or asset management tools. They collectively share the responsibility of attracting users and expanding the user base for Hyperliquid.

Among all these directions, HIP-3 represents the track with the highest perceived potential and established success stories. Simply put, HIP-3 allows third-party teams (Builders) to deploy their own perpetual contracts and operate their own trading markets based on Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and matching system.

This means entrepreneurial teams no longer need to reinvent the wheel by building a new chain or matching system, nor bear the R&D and security costs of high-performance trading infrastructure. Instead, they can directly leverage Hyperliquid's mature infrastructure to build the product layer closest to the user.

In a sense, this is highly similar to the brokerage system in traditional finance. Nasdaq itself doesn't handle advisory services, UI design, community operations, or strategy products for users. These tasks are ultimately completed by brokerages like Robinhood. Therefore, the significance of HIP-3 can be understood as further opening up the market space for "brokerage" services on top of Hyperliquid.

As for the profit model of these "brokerages," while some projects may generate revenue through ancillary services (like performance fees from asset management and strategies), the most direct sources of income for these "brokerage" projects currently are fee sharing and the expectation of HYPE appreciation.

According to Hyperliquid's current mechanism requirements, third-party deployed markets adopt fee structures higher than the native market, with a significant portion returned to the deployer or front-end operator. This means that once a front-end successfully captures the user entry point, it unlocks a real, sustainable cash flow directly correlated with trading volume. If a front-end achieves daily trading volumes in the tens of billions of dollars, relying solely on fee rebates can generate a highly scalable revenue stream.

Additionally, Hyperliquid officially requires third parties to stake at least 500,000 HYPE when deploying custom trading applications (the team has indicated this threshold will gradually decrease in the future). Given HYPE's strong recent price performance and fundamental outlook, HYPE's appreciation potential itself is a core source of returns for such projects.

Looking ahead, the token generation events of these upper-layer "brokerage" projects themselves could also become a potential revenue source, a point that needs no further elaboration.

Overview of Representative Projects

Trade.xyz: Bringing US Stocks, Commodities, and Indices into Hyperliquid

If one had to pick a project that best showcases the potential of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, Trade.xyz would undoubtedly be the first choice.

To describe what Trade.xyz does in one sentence: "Bringing assets from traditional financial markets onto Hyperliquid." Currently, Trade.xyz has successively listed perpetual contract products including the Nasdaq Composite Index, S&P 500 Index, gold, crude oil, and some US stocks. For crypto users, this means they can participate in price movements of traditional financial markets directly through Hyperliquid's liquidity system without leaving the on-chain environment.

As of now, Trade.xyz holds a dominant share in terms of both Open Interest (OI) and daily trading volume within the HIP-3 market. Real-time data from Artemis and The Block indicates it commands over 90% of the current HIP-3 market share.

For Hyperliquid, the significance of Trade.xyz lies in expanding the asset boundaries of the ecosystem. In many people's view, whether Hyperliquid can ultimately grow into an "on-chain Nasdaq" depends not just on the trading volume it can generate, but crucially on whether it can become a unified trading network covering multiple asset classes, thereby attracting new user groups and market demands.

For Trade.xyz itself, its value lies in being a first mover in the potential track of on-chain traditional financial asset trading. Today, Trade.xyz's explosive trading volume and revenue data have proven its strategic success.

Dreamcash: Capturer of Mobile Traffic

If Trade.xyz's goal is to expand Hyperliquid's asset boundaries, Dreamcash focuses on user boundaries.

For a long time, crypto trading products have shared a common problem – they are often designed for professional traders. Complex on-chain operations, obscure jargon, and high-barrier fund management methods keep a large pool of potential users out. Even platforms with excellent trading experiences like Hyperliquid primarily cater to native crypto traders.

Dreamcash aims to solve precisely this problem. Unlike many products that emphasize trading features, Dreamcash resembles a trading app from the mobile internet era. The project team has invested heavily in mobile experience, points-based incentive systems, and user growth mechanisms, hoping to lower the barrier for ordinary users to access on-chain trading through a lighter, more gamified product design. Users can simply log in with an email or social account and, within seconds, leverage crypto or global macro assets with one click, much like buying or selling stocks.

As of the time of writing, Dreamcash's cumulative downloads across iOS and Android platforms have exceeded 100,000.

Ventuals: Pioneer in the Pre-IPO Market

Ventuals did not choose to focus on existing mainstream assets in the market. Instead, it extended its reach into the area with the highest barriers and the most difficult for ordinary investors to access in traditional finance: private equity in the primary market.

In traditional financial markets, equity subscriptions for highly promising tech unicorns like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic are often monopolized by top investment banks and multi-billion dollar funds. Retail investors not only lack access but also face extremely long lock-up periods and poor liquidity. Ventuals' core logic is to utilize HIP-3's feature allowing custom liquidation and settlement rules to package the Pre-IPO equity of these unlisted companies into on-chain perpetual contracts, allowing global retail investors to directly engage in long/short speculation on the valuations of these unicorns before their official IPO.

A key reason the Nasdaq became one of the world's most important capital markets is its continuous role in meeting the financing and pricing needs of new economy companies. What Ventuals attempts is, to some extent, similar – enabling on-chain markets not only to trade existing assets but also to provide price discovery mechanisms for future assets.

Of course, this direction still has a long way to go before maturity, but it represents one of the most noteworthy evolutionary paths for on-chain capital markets.

Based: The Next Step, a "Super App"

Based aims to build a crypto "super app" covering trading, prediction markets, payments, and consumption scenarios.

Currently, Based offers trading terminal products on web, desktop, and mobile (iOS, Android). Through Based, users can trade spot and perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, access prediction markets via Polymarket, and use the Based Visa card for crypto spending in the real world.

After the implementation of HIP-3, Based took a step further from being a mere Hyperliquid front-end aggregator – it partnered with Ethena to launch HyENA, a custom trading protocol based on Hyperliquid. Unlike other HIP-3 projects primarily innovating around trading instruments, HyENA focuses on the collateral itself. The protocol introduces a collateral system centered around yield-bearing stablecoins (USDe), aiming to allow users' idle collateral to continuously generate yield while they trade.

In a sense, this is akin to introducing the logic of money market funds from traditional finance into the on-chain trading scenario. In the traditional brokerage system, idle cash in client accounts is often automatically allocated to money market funds to improve capital efficiency. HyENA attempts to reconstruct this experience within the on-chain environment.

Minara AI: When Agents Become Users

If projects like Trade.xyz, Dreamcash, and Based are still vying for the human user interface, then Minara AI represents a different, more futuristic direction: the Agent interface.

Minara's core product is an AI-oriented financial execution layer. Users can issue trading instructions directly to AI tools like Claude or Cursor using natural language. Minara then invokes Hyperliquid's underlying trading capabilities to execute operations like opening/closing positions and managing leverage. In other words, in Minara's vision, the entities directly interacting with the trading interface might no longer be humans, but AI Agents configured by the users.

In a way, this trend is not limited to the Hyperliquid ecosystem. It represents one of the most noteworthy trends in the entire internet world.

An Open Combinatorial Relationship Creates Hyperliquid's Strongest Moat

As more teams choose to build upper-layer applications on Hyperliquid, a more fundamental industry question is being pondered by many: What does this combinatorial relationship between Hyperliquid and these on-chain "brokerages" mean for competition in the exchange space?

In the past, most people's understanding of exchanges was still stuck in the "competing on products" stage. The battle was about who had a better UI, who listed more coins, who had lower fees, and who could grab more users.

But Hyperliquid is driving a distinctly different direction of competition. An increasing number of market participants are realizing that what Hyperliquid aims to be is not the familiar, user-facing trading platform. Instead, it's a piece of financial infrastructure that can be directly called by APIs, programs, and even AI systems. Then, the upper-layer "brokerages" built upon this infrastructure interface with the users.

In a way, this is very similar to the evolutionary path of software in the AI wave. In the traditional internet era, products competed on UI, user portal, and user engagement time. But in the AI era, more and more products are being reduced to "capability layers" – the API itself is becoming the new traffic entry point.

This is the new evolutionary direction Hyperliquid is championing. Because of this, more and more industry participants are starting to understand Hyperliquid as a "Financial OS." It only needs to be responsible for unifying capabilities at the base layer, while the upper-layer "brokerages" create specific scenarios.

Once this structure forms, a strongly bound symbiotic relationship emerges between Hyperliquid and these upper-layer "brokerages." For Hyperliquid, every additional upper-layer application equals a new traffic source, a new user channel, and a new trading scenario. The protocol itself doesn't need to operate these products directly, yet it continuously shares in trading fees and expands the liquidity depth of the entire network. Conversely, these upper-layer applications are highly dependent on the liquidity, matching efficiency, and on-chain trading experience Hyperliquid has already established. They don't need to build a chain, recreate an order book, or bootstrap liquidity from scratch; they need to do just two things: bring users in and make them stay.

This suggests that the future logic of competition may no longer be between one exchange and another, but could gradually evolve into competition between different financial networks. When more applications, Agents, and trading entry points choose to be built on the same liquidity network, the network itself creates an increasingly powerful gravitational pull. The platform that successfully aggregates the most developers, applications, and user entry points will also possess the deepest liquidity and the broadest market coverage.

Perhaps this is Hyperliquid's strongest moat and the most visionary aspect of the new Nasdaq.