Hyperliquid's Path into the US Revealed, but Restrictions Remain Strict

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On the evening of September 16 Beijing time, Kraken's parent company Payward officially released an announcement disclosing the details of its partnership with Hyperliquid and the path for bringing the latter's products and services into the U.S. market.

According to the announcement, Payward plans to build a custom perpetual contract trading market based on HIP-3 on the Hyperliquid mainnet through its trading and clearing unit Bitnomial and futures broker NinjaTrader Clearing, and to open trading services in this market to eligible U.S. users.

Trump's Preview Is Finally Coming to Fruition

The earliest clue regarding Hyperliquid's entry into the U.S. can be traced back to Trump's speech at the White House last month (see "The Night Crypto Surged, What Did Trump Say?").

Previously, Hyperliquid's offshore nature had been viewed as a compliance weakness. But when Trump himself said that "Michael (CFTC Chairman Michael Selig) is also working to push Hyperliquid to enter the United States in a fully compliant and legal manner," the market began speculating about how exactly Hyperliquid would enter the world's largest financial market.

The day after Trump's speech, Blockworks analyst Shaunda Devens discovered that a deployer named "Kraken HIP-3 test DEX" had enabled permission management functionality (Star gating) on the Hyperliquid testnet, with testing having gone live on August 19. Devens speculated that Kraken might be one of the first U.S. centralized exchanges to partner with Hyperliquid.

Then on September 1, Bloomberg reported confirmation of the above speculation — Hyperliquid was in deep negotiations with Kraken's parent company Payward, and if the partnership ultimately received regulatory approval, U.S. users would be able to trade certain perpetual contracts linked to token prices on the Hyperliquid blockchain through Bitnomial.

Until yesterday, Payward officially confirmed the details of its partnership with Hyperliquid. According to the announcement, Payward is not directly bringing Hyperliquid as a whole into the U.S. this time, but rather choosing to start with HIP-3, deploying a permissioned perpetual contract market for U.S. users on the Hyperliquid public chain.

Specifically, Bitnomial, which is regulated by the CFTC under Payward, will be responsible for deploying the HIP-3 market on Hyperliquid, as well as the market's creation, ownership, management, and contract clearing and settlement; NinjaTrader Clearing, a CFTC-registered futures broker also under Payward, will be responsible for managing U.S. client accounts. The relevant entities will each bear corresponding regulatory and compliance obligations.

In other words, the trading itself still occurs on Hyperliquid's public chain, with orders continuing to be matched and recorded by Hyperliquid's on-chain order book, but the account, clearing, and compliance systems for U.S. users accessing this market will be handled by Payward's regulated entities. According to Payward, U.S. clients can open futures accounts through their registered broker and then trade these new perpetual futures contracts on Hyperliquid; the relevant products will be launched under Bitnomial's rules after receiving regulatory approval.

From this perspective, Hyperliquid's entry into the U.S. is essentially finding a path to embed its on-chain infrastructure into the U.S. regulated derivatives framework — Hyperliquid provides the underlying public chain, order book, and trading infrastructure, while U.S. regulated entities like Payward are responsible for bringing in U.S. users, brokers, clearing, and regulatory requirements.

Limitations Still Exist

Another detail in the announcement that cannot be overlooked is that Hyperliquid's entry into the U.S. this time still has clear limitations in terms of the products and services it can offer.

First, Hyperliquid's originally open trading experience still requires a strict access mechanism in the U.S. market. Payward explicitly stated in the announcement that only accounts that have passed NinjaTrader's review and are simultaneously whitelisted on both NinjaTrader and Bitnomial can participate in trading in these markets. In other words, U.S. users cannot simply enter Hyperliquid and trade freely like users in other regions; they must first go through a regulated account system.

Second, the scope currently disclosed is only the HIP-3 market deployed by Bitnomial, not all existing perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid mainnet. This means that even if the products are officially approved in the future, which assets U.S. users can trade, how much leverage they can use, and whether they can further access other markets on Hyperliquid will still depend on Payward, Bitnomial, and the U.S. regulatory framework — not solely on the Hyperliquid protocol itself. Therefore, a more accurate description of this partnership is that Payward has established a "compliant zone" for U.S. users on Hyperliquid.

So what this partnership truly bridges is a connection between the U.S. regulatory system and Hyperliquid's on-chain trading infrastructure — not a full opening of the U.S. market to Hyperliquid.

Legislation Stalled, Regulation Leads the Way

Interestingly, on the same day Payward disclosed Hyperliquid's path into the U.S., the U.S. crypto regulatory environment received another less optimistic piece of news — in the early hours of September 16 Beijing time, the U.S. Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act with a 49-50 procedural vote. The bill had originally sought to further clarify the regulatory boundaries of digital assets through congressional legislation and to delineate the regulatory responsibilities of the SEC and CFTC in different digital asset markets.

But if one looks away from Congress, the actual advancement of U.S. crypto regulation has not completely stalled. Since the beginning of this year, the SEC and CFTC have continued to clarify the regulatory boundaries of certain digital assets and derivatives through interpretations, guidance, No-Action Letters, and other existing regulatory tools.

Putting these two events from yesterday together precisely reveals the true state of current U.S. crypto regulation — complete rules at the congressional level still have not materialized, but regulators have already begun using existing authority to gradually find executable compliance paths for on-chain trading, perpetual contracts, and other products.

For Hyperliquid, this partnership with Payward may be a microcosm of this regulatory environment. It did not wait for a complete new law to open the U.S. market for it, but instead first leveraged existing regulatory licenses and infrastructure such as Bitnomial and NinjaTrader to fit on-chain trading into a framework that existing rules can accommodate. So rather than saying Hyperliquid has already "entered the U.S.," it is more accurate to say it has finally found a path to try to enter the U.S. How far this path can go will ultimately depend on regulatory approval, the range of tradable assets, and what kind of crypto market structure the U.S. will ultimately form in the future.

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