REFERENCE
Everything you would want before sending money.
Contracts
Opens, marks, margins and settles every swap. Positions are ERC-721s. Holds trader margin and nothing else.
—ERC-4626 over USDC. Counterparty to the whole book; share price marks it.
—Rebuilds Hyperliquid’s funding as a cumulative index from the HyperCore read precompiles, and freezes an index at every expiry on the grid.
—Anchor plus term curve plus skew, with a utilisation-widened half-spread.
—Absorbs shortfall between a liquidated position’s losses and its margin, before the vault does.
—Read-only aggregation so a whole screen arrives in one call.
—Fixed-supply governance token; stakers receive the protocol’s share of opening fees in USDC.
—Markets
Market ids are HyperCore perp universe indices. The universe is ordered by listing, so indices are stable but not guessable — check one against the API before assuming it moved with the ticker.
| SYMBOL | ASSET INDEX | MAX NOTIONAL | TENORS |
|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 0 | $5,000,000 | 3D — 120D |
| ETH | 1 | $5,000,000 | 3D — 120D |
| HYPE | 159 | $1,000,000 | 3D — 120D |
Parameters
Launch settings, not constants. Everything below is governed and expected to move as realised funding volatility does.
The adverse average funding move initial margin covers for the rest of the term. Roughly 260% APR; about 22% of notional on a 30-day swap.
Maintenance margin as a fraction of initial.
Charged once on notional × tenor. About 14bp on a 30-day swap.
Half-spread at zero utilisation, widening by 4× at full utilisation.
Rate impact per unit of signed inventory, measured in notional-hours.
Hard cap on any quoted rate, roughly 876% APR.
Every maturity on every market lands on one of these.
Accrual freezes past this; the market stops accepting new positions.
Paid to anyone settling a matured position after one hour of grace. The first settlement on a maturity also rolls it off the live book.
Every parameter on this page moves through it. Pausing does not.
Time before a proposal opens, then how long it stays open.
0.25% of supply, so the queue is not free to spam.
A fraction rather than an absolute, so distribution cannot outgrow it.
Charged on vault withdrawals and kept by the LPs who remain.
Keepers
Three jobs, all permissionless, all of which someone has an incentive to do.
Poke the oracle
Samples the precompiles and advances the funding index. A market that goes past maxStaleness stops accepting flow and stops accruing — this is the job that matters most.
Settle matured positions
Pays 2bp of notional after an hour of grace. A matured position left on the book distorts the pool’s marks until someone clears it.
Liquidate
Closes positions whose equity has fallen through maintenance, for half the penalty. The other half goes to the insurance fund.
Risks, stated plainly
These are the ways this loses money. None of them are hypothetical and none of them are hidden in a footnote.
Oracle basis
Clamp settles against its own reconstruction of Hyperliquid’s funding, sampled at a keeper’s cadence and frozen during a staleness blackout. It will not match the venue’s own charge to the wei. If you are hedging, you are hedging most of the carry, not all of it.
Keeper liveness
No poke means no accrual. A long enough blackout means funding the venue charged that nobody’s index recorded. The bounded staleness window limits the damage; it does not eliminate it.
Margin is not a guarantee
Initial margin is calibrated to a plausible adverse move in the term rate, not to the worst one the model can produce. A fast, large repricing can outrun it between liquidations, which is what the insurance fund is for and why LPs sit behind it.
Mark approximation
The pool’s aggregate is marked at the book’s duration-weighted average tenor rather than at each position’s own. Individual settlement is always exact; the approximation only moves share price between LPs, bounded by the convexity of the curve across the tenors actually on the book.
Governance surface
Skew coefficients, spreads, margin rates, caps, which markets exist and which oracle source each uses are all governed. A bad parameter is a real way to lose money here. Every one of them moves through a two-day timelock, so the mitigation is that you can see a change coming and leave — not that it cannot happen.
The guardian
One address can halt new positions immediately, without waiting on governance, because a timelock in front of the stop button makes an incident worse. It can only ever halt: restarting and re-parameterising stay with governance. Exits are never blocked by a pause.
Unaudited
This code has not been audited. Nothing on this site is an offer, and none of it is advice.
CLAMP
Fixed supply of 100,000,000, minted once at deployment. There is no mint function and no owner who could add one.
Governance
Holders propose and vote; a two-day timelock executes. Checkpoints are keyed by timestamp rather than block number, so a five-day vote is five days regardless of what the chain's block time does that week.
Fee share
Stakers receive the protocol’s share of every opening fee, paid in USDC, through a pull-based accumulator.
Cooldown
Unstaking runs through a seven-day cooldown. Fees arrive in lumps, and without one the profitable move is to stake in the block before a large open and leave in the block after.