如果Hyperliquid是新纳斯达克，哪些项目在做券商？
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 find a way forward.
However, Odaily has recently learned that multiple startup teams have begun to view the Hyperliquid ecosystem as a direction for breakthrough, hoping to attract new 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 custom oracles, leverage limits, and settlement rules).
In the past, building a front-end to drive traffic to a DEX seemed unimaginative, as the market has always held the inertial belief that the real value is captured by liquidity, the matching engine, and the underlying protocol itself, not the front-end applications 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.
Odaily Note: See also "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 Nasdaq or the 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 capabilities; the brokerages handle the user interface, product design, and experience optimization.
If the hypothesis that Hyperliquid could become the next-generation Nasdaq holds true, then the applications built on top of Hyperliquid, responsible for directly interfacing with users and optimizing the trading experience, would no longer be simple front-ends. Instead, they would function more like "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 make money?
It's important to clarify upfront that not only HIP-3 projects can "build a business" around Hyperliquid. Theoretically, any team can build its own product based on Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and trading capabilities. Some choose to build trading front-ends, others mobile applications, and yet others strategy platforms, AI Agents, or asset management tools. They all share the responsibility of driving traffic to Hyperliquid and expanding its user base.
Among all these directions, HIP-3 represents the track with arguably the highest potential and already has some successful precedents. Simply put, HIP-3 allows third-party teams (Builders) to deploy their own perpetual contracts and operate their own trading markets using Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and matching engine.
This means startup teams no longer need to build a new chain from scratch, set up a new matching system, or bear the R&D and security costs of high-performance trading infrastructure. Instead, they can directly build the user-facing layer on top of Hyperliquid's already mature infrastructure.
In a sense, this is highly analogous to the brokerage system in traditional finance. Nasdaq itself doesn't handle investment advice, UI design, community management, or strategy products for users; these tasks are ultimately done by brokerages like Robinhood. Therefore, HIP-3's significance can be understood as further opening up the "brokerage" market space on top of Hyperliquid.
As for the profit model of these "brokerages," although some projects generate revenue through ancillary services (like performance fees from asset management and strategies), the most direct source of income for these "brokerage" projects currently remains fee sharing and the appreciation potential of HYPE.
According to Hyperliquid's current mechanism, third-party deployed markets must adopt fee structures higher than the native market. A significant portion of these fees is distributed back 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 tied to trading volume. If a front-end can achieve a daily trading volume in the tens of billions of dollars, relying solely on fee rebates could generate a highly scalable revenue stream.
Furthermore, Hyperliquid officially requires third parties to stake at least 500,000 HYPE tokens when deploying custom trading applications (the team has stated this requirement will be gradually reduced in the future). Given HYPE's recent strong market performance and fundamental outlook, the appreciation potential of HYPE itself is also a core source of returns for such projects.
Looking ahead, the potential token generation events of these upper-layer "brokerage" projects could also become a future revenue source, a point that doesn't need further elaboration.
Overview of Representative Projects
Trade.xyz: Bringing US Stocks, Commodities, and Indices onto Hyperliquid
If we had to pick one project that best showcases the imaginative potential of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, Trade.xyz would undoubtedly be the first choice.
To describe what Trade.xyz does in one sentence, it's "bringing assets from traditional financial markets onto Hyperliquid." Currently, Trade.xyz has launched perpetual contract products including the Nasdaq index, S&P 500 index, gold, crude oil, and several US stocks. For crypto users, this means they can participate in the price movements of traditional financial markets directly within the on-chain environment through Hyperliquid's liquidity system, without leaving the blockchain.
As of now, Trade.xyz holds a dominant market share, both in terms of Open Interest (OI) and daily trading volume. Real-time data from Artemis and The Block shows it commands over 90% of the current HIP-3 market.
For Hyperliquid, Trade.xyz's significance lies in expanding the ecosystem's asset boundaries. In the eyes of many, the key to Hyperliquid eventually growing into the "on-chain Nasdaq" is not just about generating massive trading volume, but about becoming a unified trading network covering diverse asset classes, thus attracting new user groups and market demands.
For Trade.xyz itself, its value lies in being the first to capture the potential track of on-chain traditional financial asset trading. Today, Trade.xyz's explosive trading volume and revenue data have proven the platform's strategic success.
Dreamcash: Capturing Mobile Traffic
If Trade.xyz aims 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, esoteric jargon, and high-barrier fund management methods have kept a large pool of potential users at bay. Even a platform like Hyperliquid, which offers an excellent trading experience, primarily serves native crypto traders.
Dreamcash seeks to solve precisely this problem. Unlike many products emphasizing trading functions, Dreamcash is more akin to a mobile internet-era trading app. The project team has invested heavily in mobile experience, point incentive systems, and user growth mechanisms, aiming to lower the barrier for ordinary users to access on-chain trading through a lighter, more game-like product design. Users simply log in with their email or social media account and can leverage crypto or global macro assets with one click, just like buying or selling stocks, within seconds.
As of writing, Dreamcash has surpassed 100,000 total downloads across iOS and Android platforms.
Ventuals: Pioneer in the Pre-IPO Market
Ventuals chose not to focus on existing mainstream assets in the market. Instead, it has extended its reach into one of the most inaccessible areas of traditional finance for ordinary investors: primary market private equity.
In traditional financial markets, equity subscriptions in highly imaginative tech unicorns like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic are often monopolized by top-tier investment banks and billion-dollar funds. Retail investors not only lack the entry threshold but also face extremely long lock-up periods and poor liquidity. Ventuals' core logic is to leverage HIP-3's allowance for custom liquidation and settlement rules, packaging the Pre-IPO equity of these private companies into on-chain perpetual contracts, allowing global retail investors to directly participate in long or short bets on their valuation before their official IPO.
A critical reason Nasdaq became one of the world's most important capital markets is its continuous role in supporting the financing and pricing needs of new economy companies. What Ventuals is attempting is, in a way, similar—enabling the on-chain market to trade not only existing assets but also 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 Stop, a "Super App"
Based aims to build a crypto "super app" covering trading, prediction markets, payments, and consumer scenarios.
Currently, Based provides 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 spend cryptocurrency in the real world using the Based Visa card.
After the implementation of HIP-3, Based took a step forward from being a pure Hyperliquid front-end aggregator: it partnered with Ethena to launch HyENA, a custom trading protocol built on Hyperliquid. Unlike other HIP-3 projects primarily innovating around trading instruments, HyENA focuses on the margin itself. The protocol introduces a margin system centered on yield-bearing stablecoins (USDe), aiming to allow users' idle margin to continuously generate yields while they are trading.
In a sense, this is akin to introducing the logic of money market funds from traditional finance into the on-chain trading environment. In traditional brokerage systems, idle funds in client accounts are often automatically allocated to money market funds to improve capital efficiency. What HyENA attempts is to recreate this experience in an on-chain environment.
Minara AI: When Agents Become Users
If projects like Trade.xyz, Dreamcash, and Based are still competing for the human user entry point, then Minara AI represents a more futuristic direction—the Agent entry point.
Minara's core product is a financial execution layer designed for AI. Users can issue trading instructions directly to AI tools like Claude or Cursor via natural language. Minara then utilizes Hyperliquid's underlying trading capabilities to execute operations like opening/closing positions and managing leverage. In other words, in Minara's vision, the entity directly using the trading interface in the future might not be a person, but the AI Agent configured by the user.
In a way, this trend extends beyond the Hyperliquid ecosystem and represents one of the most compelling directions for the entire internet world.
An Open, Combinable Relationship Creates Hyperliquid's Strongest Moat
As more teams choose to build upper-layer applications on Hyperliquid, a more industry-wide question is increasingly being considered: What does this combinable 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 stuck in the "product competition" phase. The battle was about who had a better UI, which exchange listed more coins, who had lower fees, and who could acquire more users.
But Hyperliquid is driving a distinctly different competitive direction. More and more market participants are realizing that what Hyperliquid wants to create is not a user-facing trading platform as we know it, but a set of financial infrastructure that can be directly invoked by APIs, programs, and even AI systems. The upper-layer "brokerages" built on top of this infrastructure will then interface with the users.
In a way, this is very similar to the evolution path of software amidst the AI wave. In the traditional internet era, products competed on UI, user acquisition, and user time. But in the AI era, more and more products are retreating to become "capability layers"—the API itself is becoming the new traffic entry point.
This is the new evolutionary direction that Hyperliquid is championing. It is for this reason that a growing number of industry professionals are beginning to understand Hyperliquid as a "Financial Operating System" (Financial OS). It only needs to unify capabilities at the base layer, while the upper-layer "brokerages" will be responsible for creating specific application scenarios.
Once this structure is formed, a tightly bound symbiotic relationship will develop between Hyperliquid and these upper-layer "brokerages." For Hyperliquid, every additional upper-layer application means a new traffic entry point, a new user channel, and a new trading scenario. The protocol itself doesn't need to operate these products but can continuously share in the trading fees and expand the liquidity depth of the entire network. For these upper-layer applications, they are highly dependent on the liquidity, matching efficiency, and on-chain trading experience that Hyperliquid has already established. They don't need to build a new chain, rebuild an order book, or restart liquidity. They only need to do two things well: bring users in and keep them engaged.
This means that the future logic of competition might no longer be between one exchange and another, but may gradually evolve into competition between different financial networks. When more and more applications, Agents, and trading entry points choose to build on the same liquidity network, the network itself will create an increasingly strong gravitational pull. The platform that successfully aggregates the most developers, applications, and user entry points will also possess the deepest liquidity and the widest market coverage.
Perhaps this is Hyperliquid's strongest moat and the most imaginative aspect of the new Nasdaq.
