315 perpetual markets on stocks, gold and oil: what to watch on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 exchanges

Traders on the Hyperliquid blockchain are no longer limited to cryptocurrencies. Through the HIP-3 extension, outside operators run their own futures venues there, and what they list ranges from the S&P 500 through gold and crude oil to single stocks and government bonds. A count of all these marketplaces on the morning of October 28, 2026 comes to 315 markets with $4.08 billion in open interest between them.

For an investor in Germany, though, the decisive number is not the total but the leverage tiers. The S&P 500 market of the largest operator allows leverage of up to 50x. At a provider under German supervision, 20:1 would be the ceiling on the same index. That difference is not a footnote in a fee schedule: it moves the point at which a position is force-closed by a factor of two and a half.

HIP-3 lets outside operators run their own perpetual exchanges on the Hyperliquid blockchain

A perpetual, or perp, is a futures contract with no expiry date: it tracks the price of an underlying asset and is held near the spot price through regular settlement payments between buyers and sellers, the funding rate. What HIP-3 changes is who creates the contract. Until then the exchange itself decided which markets existed. Since HIP-3 any third party that meets the conditions can take that over.

Anyone who wants to open such an exchange posts 500,000 HYPE as stake, according to Hyperliquid's specification. The amount is meant to fall over time, but stays locked for at least 183 days after launch. An operator may list its first three markets without further conditions; every one after that goes through a Dutch auction shared by all HIP-3 operators. On top of that it receives a reserve of listings it can redeem at the current auction price with no waiting time.

HYPE traded at $81.62 on October 28, 2026 at 8:54 am, 5.38 percent above the previous day, according to market data from Coinpaprika. How the token has moved before that is covered in our Hyperliquid price prediction. For the operators this price is more than a quote: it determines how much capital those 500,000 HYPE tie up.

315 markets and $4.08 billion in open interest: the count from October 28

The figures that follow are based on Hyperliquid's public market data, collected on October 28, 2026 shortly after 9 am. All ten reported HIP-3 exchanges were examined, with 315 markets between them. cryptoticker.io collected this data itself on October 28, 2026.

Open interest is the value of all positions open at a given moment. Across all ten exchanges it adds up to $4.08 billion. For comparison: Hyperliquid's own crypto marketplace, which still carries the core business, stands at $11.58 billion. The offshoots thus reach a good third of the main business, and they are only a few months old.

A single operator carries 97 percent of the open interest

The distribution is extremely lopsided. Of the $4.08 billion, $3.97 billion sits with a single operator running 139 markets. That is 97 percent. Behind it comes a second provider with $87.5 million across 16 markets, then one with $17.3 million across 39 markets and one with $8.2 million across 24. Six of the ten exchanges report zero open interest across every one of their markets. Listed and tradable they are, but so far nobody holds a position there.

For an investor that leads to a very practical point: two markets on the same underlying can look technically identical and be entirely different in liquidity. Four operators each run a Tesla market, with leverage tiers of 10, 12 and 20. In none of those four markets was there an open position on the morning of October 28. Place a sizeable order there and you are the market.

S&P 500 at 50x leverage, gold at 25x, crude oil at 20x

The largest markets by open interest are not niche names. At the top stands the S&P 500 with $417.1 million and permitted leverage of 50. Then come gold with $323.1 million at 25x, a US technology index with $289.0 million at 30x, WTI crude with $218.1 million and Brent with $211.1 million, both at 20x, plus silver with $168.1 million at 25x.

Across all 315 markets the most common tier is 10x leverage, allowed by 171 markets. 67 markets permit 20x, 22 markets 25x, three markets each 30x and 40x, and seven markets the maximum of 50. The high tiers are therefore the exception. They sit, however, precisely where most of the money is.

BaFin caps the same index at 5 percent margin for German providers

The yardstick comes from BaFin's general administrative act of July 23, 2019. The act carries the temporary interventions of the European securities regulator permanently into German law, based on Article 42 of the MiFIR regulation, and for each asset class it names a minimum margin below which a contract for difference may not be marketed to retail clients.

For main equity indices the act demands 5 percent of notional value and names the S&P 500 explicitly as an example, alongside the DAX, the EURO STOXX 50 and the Nikkei 225. Five percent margin corresponds to leverage of 20:1. For non-main indices it is 10 percent, so 10:1. Gold is treated like a main index and sits at 5 percent, other commodities at 10 percent. Single stocks require 20 percent, which is 5:1. For cryptocurrencies the act sets 50 percent, so 2:1.

These rates apply to retail clients. Anyone who has themselves classified as a professional client falls outside that protection. How perpetuals are to be classified in law, and where the line to a contract for difference runs, we covered at greater length in our classification of perpetual futures and CFD rules.

Single stocks like Tesla: 20 percent margin at a CFD provider, 5 percent on a HIP-3 market

Lay the two sets of figures side by side and the gap is widest on single stocks. BaFin demands 20 percent margin there. The Tesla market with the highest permitted tier among the HIP-3 exchanges allows 20x leverage, which means 5 percent margin. The same picture at Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta, which one operator runs at 20x leverage throughout.

On the main index the gap is smaller, but points the same way: 20:1 under the act against 50:1 in the largest market. On crude oil it is 10:1 against 20:1. In concrete terms, for the liquidation threshold: at 50x leverage a 2 percent move against the position eats up the margin, at 20x it takes 5 percent. An index that loses 2 percent in a trading day is nothing out of the ordinary.

On the bitcoin perpetual the ratio is reversed

It is worth noting that the gap is widest on cryptocurrencies, even though no HIP-3 market is needed there at all. On Hyperliquid's own crypto marketplace the ceiling for bitcoin is 40x leverage, for ether 25x. BaFin's act sets 50 percent margin for cryptocurrencies, so 2:1. Of all asset classes that is the strictest rate in the act, and at the same time the widest gap to practice on the blockchain.

Anyone even considering such markets should therefore start by telling them apart. Which venues exist, how their fees and funding models differ and which leverage tiers they run is set out in our comparison of perp DEXs.

Pre-IPO markets on SpaceX and OpenAI have no exchange price as reference

Some of the markets track companies that are not listed at all. One operator runs markets on SpaceX and OpenAI, both at 3x leverage. Another lists a market on OpenAI at 6x and one on Anthropic at 15x leverage, the latter with $56.7 million in open interest and thus the largest market outside the dominant operator.

With a listed asset there is an exchange price against which the price of a contract can be checked. With a company that has no listing, that reference is missing. The fact that operators pick the lowest tiers of their range here, 3x and 6x, suggests they are aware of the problem.

The market's own operator sets the oracle price

The point that differs most clearly from a supervised venue is in the specification itself: the operator defines the oracle and the contract terms, and the operator sets the oracle prices. It is against that price that it is measured whether a position is in profit and when it gets liquidated.

For cross-margin positions there is one control on this: validators review every move in the external price of more than 50 percent against the start of the day. Assets where such daily jumps are to be expected more than once a month may not run in cross-margin mode. The threshold therefore sits very high. What it catches is the extreme case, not the everyday deviation of a few percent.

haltTrading cancels all orders and settles positions at the mark price

An operator can shut down one of its markets. The function is called haltTrading, and the specification describes its effect briefly: the call cancels all orders and settles the positions at the current mark price. The same function can resume trading later.

That is something other than a trading halt at a futures exchange, after which the position still stands. Here it ends at whatever price applies in that moment. Anyone intending to hold a leveraged position for weeks should know this mechanism before opening it.

500,000 HYPE stake, 183 days locked, slashing of up to 100 percent

What stands against misconduct by the operator is its stake. The size of a cut is determined by a stake-weighted median of the validator votes. As reference points the specification names up to 100 percent for invalid state transitions or a long outage, up to 50 percent for a short outage and up to 20 percent for performance problems. The stake remains exposed even during the seven-day queue for withdrawal.

One limitation is stated explicitly in the specification and is the most important sentence of the whole section for investors: stake that is cut is burned and not distributed to users. Slashing therefore punishes the operator; it does not make good a loss. There is no deposit guarantee here and no claim to compensation of the kind a supervised investment firm in Germany brings with it.

On top of that comes the cost side, which an operator sets itself: it can add a fee share of 0 to 300 percent, or 0 to 100 percent in what is called growth mode. If the share goes above 100 percent, the protocol fee follows up to the level of the operator fee. Two markets on the same underlying can therefore sit far apart in liquidity and in cost.

Stock perpetuals: 2 percent against you is enough at 50x leverage

The count shows a market that has grown to $4.08 billion in a few months and opens up underlying assets not available in this form from any German provider. At the same time it shows that the leverage tiers there run furthest above the German limits in exactly those classes where the regulator drew them tightest in 2019. Three steps make sense before money moves:

1. Measure the leverage tier against your own loss limit. At 50x leverage liquidation sits 2 percent away, at 20x it is 5 percent. If you want to hold the same position with supervision and deposit protection, the supervised routes are in our comparison of crypto brokers.
2. Check the venue before the underlying. Six of the ten HIP-3 exchanges had zero open interest on October 28. If you would rather stay on a venue with EU authorisation, the licensed providers are listed in our overview of MiCA-regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Settle the tax treatment early. In Germany futures contracts follow different rules than buying a coin, and keeping the two cleanly apart is a question of record-keeping. Which tools manage that is set out in our comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of October 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)