Nếu Hyperliquid là Nasdaq mới, những dự án nào đang đóng vai trò là các công ty môi giới?

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Amidst the persistent downturn in the crypto market and the shrinking liquidity, entrepreneurs in the industry are facing unprecedented pressure to find breakthroughs.

However, Odaily has recently learned that multiple startup teams have begun to view the Hyperliquid ecosystem as a direction for breakthroughs. They aim to capture value by building trading front-ends, strategy platforms, AI Agents, and HIP-3 custom markets (with customizable oracles, leverage limits, and settlement rules), simultaneously attracting users to Hyperliquid.

In the past, building a front-end to channel users to a DEX seemed uninteresting, as the market often holds the inertial belief that real value is captured by liquidity, matching engines, and the underlying protocol itself, not by the dependent front-end windows.

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 "After 220 Days Since 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 platforms that truly build relationships with users are brokerages like Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and Charles Schwab. Exchanges provide the underlying market, liquidity, and matching capabilities; brokerages handle user acquisition, product design, and experience optimization.

If the hypothesis of Hyperliquid becoming a new-generation Nasdaq holds true, then the applications built on Hyperliquid, responsible for directly connecting with users and optimizing their trading experience, would no longer be simple front-ends. Instead, they would resemble "brokerages" in the traditional financial system.

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

Before delving into specific "brokerage" platforms, we need to briefly answer two questions. What is HIP-3? And how can these HIP-3-based projects generate revenue?

First, it's important to note that it's not just HIP-3 projects that can "build" around Hyperliquid. Theoretically, any team can create a product leveraging Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and trading capabilities. Some might build trading front-ends, others mobile applications, and still others strategy platforms, AI Agents, or asset management tools. They all share the responsibility of attracting users and expanding Hyperliquid's boundaries.

Among all these directions, HIP-3 represents the track with arguably the highest potential and already has successful case studies. 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 startup teams no longer need to build a new chain from scratch, create a new matching engine, 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 similar to the brokerage system in traditional finance. Nasdaq itself doesn't handle investment advice, UI design, community operations, or strategy products for users; those tasks are ultimately completed 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," while some projects may also generate revenue through ancillary services (e.g., performance fees from asset management and strategies), the most direct source of income for such "brokerage" projects currently remains fee sharing and the appreciation expectation of HYPE.

According to Hyperliquid's current mechanism, third-party deployed markets adopt higher fee standards 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, and volume-dependent cash flow. If a front-end could achieve daily trading volumes in the tens of billions of dollars, relying solely on fee rebates would create a highly scalable and lucrative revenue stream.

Furthermore, Hyperliquid officially requires third parties to stake at least 500,000 HYPE (with an official statement indicating this requirement will be gradually reduced) when deploying custom trading applications. Given HYPE's recent strong performance and fundamental outlook, HYPE's own appreciation potential is also a core source of returns for such projects.

Looking ahead, potential token generation events by these upper-layer "brokerage" projects could also become a source of future revenue, a point that doesn't require further elaboration.

A Look at Representative Projects

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

If there's one project that best showcases the potential of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, Trade.xyz is undoubtedly the first choice.

To put Trade.xyz's mission in one sentence: "Bringing traditional financial market assets onto Hyperliquid." Currently, Trade.xyz has successively launched perpetual contract products tracking indices like the Nasdaq, S&P 500, gold, crude oil, and several US stocks. For crypto users, this means they can participate in the price movements of traditional financial markets through Hyperliquid's liquidity system without leaving the on-chain environment.

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

For Hyperliquid, Trade.xyz's significance lies in expanding the ecosystem's asset boundaries. 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 on its ability to become a unified trading network covering multiple asset classes, thereby attracting new user groups and market demand.

For Trade.xyz itself, its value lies in being an early mover in the high-potential track of on-chain traditional financial asset trading. Today, its explosive trading volume and revenue data confirm the platform's strategic success.

Dreamcash: Capturing Mobile Traffic

If Trade.xyz aims to expand Hyperliquid's asset boundaries, Dreamcash focuses on the user boundary.

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-threshold fund management methods have kept a large pool of potential users at bay. Even platforms like Hyperliquid, which offer an already excellent trading experience, primarily cater to native crypto traders.

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

As of writing, Dreamcash has accumulated over 100,000 downloads across both iOS and Android platforms.

Ventuals: Pioneering the Pre-IPO Market

Ventuals hasn't chosen to focus on mainstream existing assets. Instead, it reaches into an area within traditional finance known for its high barriers and extreme difficulty for ordinary investors: primary market private equity.

In traditional financial markets, share subscriptions in high-potential tech unicorns like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic are often monopolized by top investment banks and multi-billion dollar funds. Retail investors lack access, face extremely long lock-up periods, and endure poor liquidity. Ventuals' core logic leverages HIP-3's allowance for custom liquidation and settlement rules to package Pre-IPO equity of these unlisted companies into on-chain perpetual contracts, enabling global retail investors to bet directly on the valuation of these unicorns before their official IPO.

A critical reason Nasdaq became one of the world's most important capital markets is its consistent role in underwriting the financing and pricing needs of new economy companies. What Ventuals is attempting is somewhat similar – allowing the on-chain market not only to trade existing assets but also to provide a price discovery mechanism 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 directions 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 spending.

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

Following the implementation of HIP-3, Based has taken a step further from being a pure Hyperliquid front-end aggregator: it partnered with Ethena to launch HyENA, a custom trading protocol on Hyperliquid. Unlike other HIP-3 projects primarily innovating on trading assets, HyENA focuses on the collateral itself. The protocol introduces a margin system centered around a yield-bearing stablecoin (USDe), aiming to allow users' idle margin to generate continuous yield 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 the traditional brokerage system, idle funds in client accounts are often automatically allocated to money market funds to improve capital efficiency. HyENA attempts to recreate this experience within the on-chain environment.

Minara AI: When Agents Become Users

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

Minara's core product is a financial execution layer designed for AI. Users can send trading instructions directly to AI tools like Claude or Cursor via natural language, and Minara invokes Hyperliquid's underlying trading capabilities to execute operations like opening positions, 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 human, but the AI Agent configured by the user.

In a sense, this trend isn't limited to the Hyperliquid ecosystem but is one of the most noteworthy developments across the entire internet world.

The Open Combinatorial Relationship Creates Hyperliquid's Strongest Moat

As more teams choose to build upper-layer applications based on Hyperliquid, an industry-level question is increasingly being contemplated – What does this combinatorial relationship between Hyperliquid and these on-chain "brokerages" mean for competition in the exchange space?

Traditionally, most people's understanding of exchanges was stuck at the "product competition" stage. The competition revolved around who has a better UI, who lists more coins, who has lower fees, and who can acquire more users.

But Hyperliquid is driving a completely different competitive direction. A growing number of market participants realize that Hyperliquid's ambition is not to be the familiar user-facing trading platform, but a set of financial infrastructure directly callable by APIs, programs, and even AI systems, with the upper-layer "brokerages" built on top handling user interaction.

In a sense, this closely mirrors the evolution of software under the AI wave. In the traditional internet era, products competed on UI, user interfaces, and user engagement time. But in the AI era, more and more products are devolving into a "capability layer" – the API itself is becoming the new traffic gateway.

This is the new evolutionary direction Hyperliquid is leading. Consequently, more and more practitioners are beginning to understand Hyperliquid as a "Financial OS." It only needs to unify capabilities at the base layer, while the upper-layer "brokerages" create specific use cases.

Once this structure forms, a strongly symbiotic relationship is created between Hyperliquid and these upper-layer "brokerages." For Hyperliquid, each additional upper-layer application represents a new traffic gateway, a new user channel, and a new trading scenario. The protocol itself doesn't need to operate these products manually but can continuously share in trading fees and expand the network's liquidity depth. For these upper-layer applications, they are highly dependent on Hyperliquid's established liquidity, matching efficiency, and on-chain trading experience. They don't need to rebuild chains, order books, or cold-start liquidity anew. They only need to do two things well: bring users in and keep them engaged.

This implies that the future competitive logic might shift from being between one exchange and another to gradually evolving into competition between different financial networks. When more applications, Agents, and trading interfaces choose to build upon the same liquidity network, the network itself creates an increasingly strong gravitational pull. The platform that successfully attracts the most developers, most applications, and most user gateways will also possess the deepest liquidity and broadest market coverage.

Perhaps this is Hyperliquid's strongest moat, and the most compelling aspect of the "New Nasdaq" narrative.