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

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Amidst the persistently sluggish crypto market and 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 see the Hyperliquid ecosystem as a direction for breakthroughs. They aim to capture value for themselves while helping to attract users to Hyperliquid by building trading frontends, strategy platforms, AI Agents, and HIP-3 custom markets (which allow customization of oracles, leverage limits, and settlement rules).

In the past, building a frontend to funnel users to a DEX seemed uninspiring, as there was always a conventional wisdom in the market that the real value was captured by the liquidity, matching engine, and underlying protocol itself, not by the frontends relying on 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 changing.

Odaily Note: See also "After 220 Days of Trade.xyz, Hyperliquid is Becoming the 'New Nasdaq'"

Analogous to the traditional stock market, retail investors do not 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 are responsible for the user interface, product design, and experience optimization.

If the hypothesis that Hyperliquid is becoming the new generation of Nasdaq holds true, then applications built on Hyperliquid, which are responsible for directly interfacing with users and optimizing trading experiences, are no longer simple frontends. They are more akin to the "brokerages" in the traditional financial system.

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

Before diving into 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?

It's important to note first that it's not only HIP-3 projects that can "start a business" around Hyperliquid. In theory, any team can build their own product based on Hyperliquid's underlying liquidity and trading capabilities. Some choose to build trading frontends, others mobile applications, and still others strategy platforms, AI Agents, or asset management tools. They all share the responsibility of attracting users and expanding user boundaries for Hyperliquid.

Among all these directions, HIP-3 represents a track with relatively high potential and some existing 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 engine system.

This means startup teams no longer need to build a blockchain from scratch, re-establish a matching system, or bear the R&D and security costs of high-performance trading infrastructure. Instead, they can directly build the user-facing product 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 is not responsible for helping users with investment advice, UI design, community operations, or providing strategy products. These tasks are ultimately completed by brokerages like Robinhood. Therefore, the significance of HIP-3 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 generate revenue through ancillary services (e.g., performance fees from asset management and strategies), the most direct source of income for these "brokerage" projects currently remains fee sharing and the expectation of HYPE appreciation.

According to Hyperliquid's current mechanism, third-party deployed markets adopt higher fee standards than native markets, with a significant portion returned to the deployer or frontend operator. This means that once a frontend successfully captures the user entry point, it unlocks real, sustainable cash flow directly proportional to trading volume. If a frontend can achieve billions of dollars in daily trading volume, relying solely on fee rebates can form a highly lucrative revenue scale.

Furthermore, Hyperliquid requires third parties deploying custom trading applications to stake at least 500,000 HYPE (though the team has stated they will gradually lower this requirement). Given HYPE's recent strong performance and fundamentals, the appreciation potential of HYPE itself is also one of the core return sources for such projects.

Looking ahead, the potential token issuance by the upper-layer "brokerage" projects themselves could also become a source of income, but we won't expand on that here.

Spotlight on Typical Projects

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

If you want to find a project that best showcases the potential of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, Trade.xyz is undoubtedly the first choice.

To describe what Trade.xyz does in one sentence: it brings 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 fluctuations of traditional financial markets directly within an on-chain environment using Hyperliquid's liquidity system.

As of now, Trade.xyz holds a dominant market share in both Open Interest (OI) and daily trading volume. Real-time data from Artemis and The Block shows it has secured 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 on how much trading volume it can generate, but on whether it can become a unified trading network covering diverse asset classes, thereby attracting new user groups and market demand.

For Trade.xyz itself, its value lies in being the first to occupy this 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's goal is to expand Hyperliquid's asset boundaries, then 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-entry-threshold capital management methods keep many potential users at bay. Even platforms like Hyperliquid, which offer an excellent trading experience, primarily cater to native crypto traders.

Dreamcash seeks to solve this problem. Unlike many products emphasizing trading features, Dreamcash is more like a trading app from the mobile internet era. The team has invested heavily in mobile experience, points-based incentive systems, and user growth mechanisms. The goal is to lower the barrier to entry for ordinary users to engage in on-chain trading through a lighter, more gamified product design. Users only need to log in with their email or social account to leverage crypto or global macro assets with one click, similar to buying or selling stocks.

As of writing, Dreamcash's cumulative downloads on both iOS and Android platforms have exceeded 100,000 times.

Ventuals: Pioneer in the Pre-IPO Market

Ventuals did not choose to focus on existing mainstream assets. Instead, it targets an area within traditional finance that has the highest barriers and is hardest for ordinary investors to access: primary market private equity.

In traditional financial markets, equity subscriptions in highly promising tech unicorns like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic are often monopolized by top-tier investment banks and multi-billion dollar funds. Retail investors lack entry points, face extremely long lock-up periods, and poor liquidity. Ventuals' core logic leverages HIP-3's feature allowing customized liquidation and settlement rules. It packages the Pre-IPO equity of these unlisted companies into on-chain perpetual contracts, enabling retail investors worldwide to directly speculate on the valuations of these unicorns before their official public listing.

A critical reason why 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. In a way, what Ventuals is attempting is similar: allowing on-chain markets not only to trade existing assets but also to provide price discovery mechanisms for future assets.

Of course, this direction is still far from maturity, but it represents one of the most noteworthy evolutionary paths for on-chain capital markets.

Based: The Next Stop – "Super App"

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

Currently, Based offers trading terminals 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 real-world crypto spending.

After the implementation of HIP-3, Based took another step forward from being a mere Hyperliquid frontend aggregator. It partnered with Ethena to launch HyENA, a custom trading protocol based on Hyperliquid. Unlike other HIP-3 projects primarily innovating around the trading asset itself, HyENA focuses on the collateral. The protocol introduces a collateral system centered around yield-bearing stablecoins (USDe), aiming to allow users' idle collateral to generate continuous returns even while trading.

In a sense, this brings the logic of money market funds from traditional finance into the on-chain trading scenario. 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 the Users

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

Minara's core product is an AI-oriented financial execution layer. Users can directly issue trading instructions to AI tools like Claude or Cursor via natural language. Minara then invokes Hyperliquid's underlying trading capabilities to execute opening positions, closing positions, leverage management, and other operations. In other words, in Minara's vision, the direct user of the trading interface in the future may no longer be a human, but an AI Agent configured by the user.

In a sense, this is not limited to the Hyperliquid ecosystem; it is one of the most noteworthy trends across the entire internet world.

The Open Combinatorial Relationship: Hyperliquid's Strongest Moat

As more teams choose to build upper-layer applications based on Hyperliquid, a more industry-wide question is being pondered: 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 stuck in the phase of "competing on features." Competitions were about who had a better UI, who listed more coins, who had lower fees, and who could capture more users.

But Hyperliquid is driving a fundamentally different competitive direction. More and more market participants realize that what Hyperliquid aims to be is not the user-facing trading platform we are familiar with, but a set of financial infrastructure that can be directly invoked by APIs, programs, and even AI systems, with the upper-layer "brokerages" built on top of it connecting to users.

In a sense, this closely mirrors the evolution of software under the AI wave. In the traditional Internet era, products competed on UI, entry points, and user time. But in the AI era, more products are regressing to the "capability layer" – the API itself is becoming the new traffic gateway.

This is the new evolutionary direction Hyperliquid is pioneering. It is also why more and more industry participants are beginning 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" are responsible for creating specific scenarios.

Once this structure is formed, a tightly bound symbiotic relationship emerges between Hyperliquid and these upper-layer "brokerages." For Hyperliquid, every additional upper-layer application equals a new traffic gateway, a new user channel, and a new trading scenario. The protocol itself doesn't need to operate these products personally but can continuously share trading fees and expand the entire network's liquidity depth. Conversely, these upper-layer applications are highly dependent on the liquidity, matching efficiency, and on-chain trading experience that Hyperliquid has already established. They don't need to rebuild a blockchain, recreate an order book, or bootstrap liquidity from scratch. They only need to do two things: bring users in and keep them there.

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

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