Hyperliquid Plans a US Door – With a Guest List
Hyperliquid says Kraken parent Payward intends to become the first CFTC-regulated firm to run its own US perpetual futures market on the decentralized exchange, pending regulatory approval.
Key Takeaways
- Only allowlisted NinjaTrader and Bitnomial accounts could trade
- HIP-3 markets start with their own order book
- Operator could force reduce-only trading and move collateral
- Payward would run two separate US perps books
Hyperliquid confirmed the plan in an October 26 post on X, The Block reported, six weeks after Payward first set out the structure in a September 16 announcement.
Payward’s second route to US perps
Payward already sells perpetual futures, contracts with no expiry date, to US clients. Since June 15, eligible Kraken Pro users have traded Bitnomial-listed perps on BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP and five other assets through NinjaTrader Clearing, with funding exchanged every eight hours. The Hyperliquid plan, whose account structure Coindoo covered earlier, keeps that chain of regulated firms and swaps in a different matching engine.
| Firm | Role in the Hyperliquid plan |
|---|---|
| NinjaTrader Clearing | Onboards clients and carries their futures accounts |
| Bitnomial Exchange | Deploys, owns and administers the HIP-3 market |
| Bitnomial Clearinghouse | Clears and settles the contracts |
| Hyperliquid | Matches orders and records trades onchain |
The contracts would be listed under Bitnomial Exchange’s rules, subject to regulatory approval, and Payward has given no timeline. Bitnomial Exchange is a CFTC-designated contract market, and the CFTC’s register lists Bitnomial Clearinghouse as a derivatives clearing organization.
That leaves Payward with two venues competing for the same approved customers. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi addressed the overlap in September, saying the firm lists its own US perps and will deploy on Hyperliquid as well because clients come first. The onchain version adds a public order book where every order and fill is recorded. What it gives up, at least at launch, is the head start Kraken’s June contracts already have.
A HIP-3 market starts with an empty book
HIP-3 lets outside operators that stake 500,000 HYPE deploy their own perpetual markets on Hyperliquid, with the stake locked for at least 183 days. Each deployment gets its own margining, order books and settings. Payward would use a permissioned variant, written HIP-3*, which adds an allowlist for that deployment alone. Hyperliquid’s existing markets stay open as before.
Depth in builder-deployed markets is already concentrated. In Payward’s own announcement, Sethi said one venue holds 98% of their open interest, and that no registered US exchange or clearinghouse has yet deployed one.
Pricing can lean on the main market. On a HIP-3* venue, the mark price is the median of the deployer’s oracle-based price, the matching contract on Hyperliquid’s main exchange, and the venue’s own best bid, ask and last trade. That keeps valuations and liquidations close to the main market. It adds no orders, though: a US trader closing a large position trades against whatever bids allowlisted market makers have posted, and Payward has not named any.
Firms approved on both venues could buy where a contract is cheap and sell where it is dear, pulling prices together. Only allowlisted accounts can do that on the US side, so the gap between the two markets will depend on how many market makers Bitnomial admits.
What the operator can do after letting you in
HIP-3* deployer powers, per Hyperliquid’s testnet documentation
- Add or remove an account from the allowlist
- Switch an account to reduce-only, so it can only shrink positions
- Cancel an account’s resting orders, or place reduce-only orders on its behalf
- Move collateral from a user’s account to another account on the same venue
Standard HIP-3 also lets a deployer set leverage limits of up to 50x, adjust funding parameters, and halt an asset, which cancels all orders and settles open positions at the mark price.
Those tools resemble what any regulated futures operator needs to close out a defaulting client. The open question is the rulebook: when Bitnomial would use reduce-only status or collateral transfers, how long a customer who loses eligibility mid-trade gets to exit, and how collateral comes back. Payward has not published those rules, and the permissioned features remain on testnet.
The terms still missing
Payward has not said which contracts would list first, what leverage or collateral it would accept, or what it would charge on top of Hyperliquid’s fees. HIP-3 deployers can add a fee share of up to 300% of the protocol fee and set their own funding multipliers, interest rates and caps. Neither Kraken’s eight-hour schedule nor Hyperliquid’s main-market rates is therefore a reliable guide.
For a fund hedging a bitcoin holding over three months, funding will matter more than a tighter spread on entry. A rate of 0.01% every eight hours, for example, adds up to about 2.7% over 90 days.
Three things will decide whether the market works: regulatory sign-off, the first market makers Bitnomial admits, and a published funding schedule. Until all three arrive, Payward’s Hyperliquid perps are a structure without prices.
Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Over the years, Kosta has contributed to multiple crypto media outlets in different regions, authoring over 6,000 articles across the sector. His reporting spans cryptocurrency markets and the broader fintech industry, tracking not only price action but also the technological and regulatory forces shaping the ecosystem. To support his analysis, Kosta actively leverages on-chain data and metrics from leading platforms such as Santiment, Glassnode, and CryptoQuant, enabling deeper, evidence-based market insights. He believes in the power of transparency and the data that underpins the blockchain ecosystem. His academic background in Marketing Management from Denmark further complements his analytical approach, adding a strong understanding of communication strategy and content positioning to his work.
