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TradeStart here1 page
Start here: tradingFoundationWhere a trader stands in the house, which floors every order touches, what you use to trade, and a reading order from a first trade to professional practice.
TradeTrading fundamentals6 pages
Accounts, deposits and your first tradeFoundationTrading on Hyperliquid needs an EVM address, a deposit that lands on HyperCore and one gas-free signature; then every order is an on-chain transaction.Order types and time in forceFoundationEvery order on HyperCore is a limit order with one of three time-in-force rules, Gtc, Ioc or Alo; a market order is a limit order with a worst acceptable price.Take profit, stop loss, TWAP and scale ordersPractitionerTrigger orders wait for the mark price, then send an ordinary order with a worst price; TWAP and scale orders split one decision into many limit orders.Fees, tiers and rebatesFoundationEvery fill pays a maker or taker fee set by one 14-day volume tier, cut by staked HYPE and referral codes, with rebates for the largest makers.Entry price and PnLFoundationEntry price and PnL are display conventions computed from your fills; HyperCore itself margins cash and signed position size.Self-trade preventionPractitionerWhen an order would fill against the same address's resting order, HyperCore cancels the resting one: no fill, no fee, and the incoming order carries on.
TradePerpetuals9 pages
What a perpetual future isFoundationA perpetual future is a contract on an asset's price that never expires, kept close to that price by an hourly payment between longs and shorts.Contract specificationsPractitionerEvery Hyperliquid perp is a linear contract on 1 unit of its asset, defined by size decimals, maximum leverage, a margin table and a margin mode.FundingPractitionerFunding is an hourly payment between longs and shorts, set by how far the perp trades from the oracle price, that ties a contract with no expiry to its index.Margin: cross, isolated and margin tiersPractitionerMargin is the collateral behind a perp: initial margin to open, maintenance margin to stay open, shared in cross mode or ring-fenced in isolated mode.Leverage and liquidationPractitionerBelow maintenance margin, positions go to the order book as market orders; below two thirds of it, the liquidator vault takes them over.Auto-deleveragingExpertWhen an account goes below zero, auto-deleveraging closes the most profitable, most leveraged opposing positions at the previous mark price, leaving no bad debt.Hyperps and index perpetualsPractitionerHyperps fund against a moving average of their own mark price until spot trading exists; index perps track a formula the validators publish.AMM-priced perpetualsExpertSome perps price off a Uniswap V2 or V3 pool instead of exchange spot prices, and are isolated only, with margin locked in until the position closes.DelistingPractitionerWhen validators vote to delist a perp, positions settle at the 1-hour time-weighted oracle price before the vote and no new orders are accepted.
TradeSpot3 pages
Spot marketsFoundationA spot market on HyperCore swaps one token balance for another on an on-chain order book, fully funded, with no funding or liquidation, under pair names like @107.Native tokens for tradersFoundationA HIP-1 token is a capped-supply token native to HyperCore whose supply, genesis split, deployer and launch liquidity are public state a buyer can check.Hyperliquidity for tradersPractitionerHyperliquidity is a protocol-run ladder of post-only orders 0.3 per cent apart, refreshed at most every 3 seconds, that gives a new token two-sided liquidity without a market maker.
TradeOutcome markets4 pages
What an outcome market isFoundationAn outcome market trades fully collateralised contracts on an event: every Yes and No pair is backed by 1 unit of quote token and always redeems for exactly 1.Market shapes: binary, labelled, multi-outcome, price bucket, scalarPractitionerEvery HIP-4 market arranges the same Yes and No outcome into one of five shapes: price binary, labelled binary, multi-outcome question, price buckets or scalar.Split, merge, negatePractitionerFour conversions turn collateral into outcome positions and back at exactly 1 per complete set, which keeps related outcome books priced consistently.SettlementPractitionerSettlement posts one fraction per outcome, converts every Yes to it and every No to the rest in the quote token, then prunes the outcome from the live list.
TradeAccounts and credit5 pages
Account modes: standard, unified, portfolio marginPractitionerAn account's mode decides whether its spot and perp balances are one pool or several, which assets back perps, and whether a 50k daily action cap applies.Portfolio marginExpertPortfolio margin treats an account's cross perps and spot balances as one portfolio, borrows against HYPE and BTC, and liquidates when its ratio passes 0.95.Borrowing and lendingPractitionerHyperCore lends USDC and USDT against HYPE or BTC at a fixed loan-to-value, on a curve where suppliers earn the borrow rate times utilisation times 0.9.Sub-accountsPractitionerA sub-account is a separate HyperCore account with its own address, balances, margin and rate limits, signed for by a master account whose fee tier it shares.API wallets and agentsPractitionerAn API wallet is a key the master account approves to sign trades for it: it can place and cancel orders but cannot withdraw or send funds to another address.
TradeAdvanced trading4 pages
Market making on HyperliquidExpertMarket making on Hyperliquid is post-only quoting on an on-chain book with no special terms, where repricing, reconciliation, nonces and shutdown decide survival.Latency, priority and infrastructureExpertHyperliquid latency is set by distance to Tokyo, consensus and your own round trips, and the protocol sells read and write priority for fees that are burned.Carry: funding, basis and borrowExpertCarry on Hyperliquid is set by three published rates, hourly funding, the spot-perp basis and the borrow rate, each computable before a position is taken.Risk playbookPractitionerMost losses on Hyperliquid come from liquidation distance, shared margin, funding, auto-deleveraging and operational slips, each checkable before sizing up.
TradeIncentives2 pages
ReferralsFoundationA referrer earns 10% of a referred trader's fees for that trader's first $1B of volume, and the referred trader gets a 4% fee discount on their first $25M.Points (historical)FoundationHyperliquid ran two points programmes: 1M points a week from November 2023 to May 2024, then 700k a week in an L1 phase from May to November 2024.
LearnWhat Hyperliquid is and how it works
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First principles
Consensus and validators
HyperCore
Research
For the press
TradeMarkets, margin and risk
Start here
Trading fundamentals
Perpetuals
Spot
Outcome markets
Accounts and credit
Advanced trading
Incentives
BuildApps, bots and contracts
Start here
Build on HyperCore
Build on the HyperEVM
DeployLaunch and run markets
Start here
The HIPs
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ReferenceEvery number, action and term
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Protocol tables

Account modes: standard, unified, portfolio margin

Practitioner

An account's mode decides whether its spot and perp balances are one pool or several, which assets back perps, and whether a 50k daily action cap applies.

Your account mode decides which balances can back a trade. HyperCore keeps separate perp and spot clearinghouses, and each HIP-3 perp dex adds a perp balance with its own collateral asset (the clearinghouse). The mode keeps them apart for precision or pools them for convenience.

Say you hold 10,000 USDC, with USDC-settled cross positions on two dexes using 1,500 and 500 USDC of maintenance margin. In standard mode your spot USDC backs neither until you move it. In unified mode it backs both, and the risk ratio below reads 2,000 / 10,000 = 0.2.

Three live modes, one retired

Section titled “Three live modes, one retired”

Some accounts still report a fourth, discontinued mode.

Mode Balances Cross margin Docs recommend it for
Standard (also called Manual) separate spot and perp balances, and a separate balance per perp dex within one dex only market makers, high-volume automated users, deployers and builders
Unified account one balance per asset, shared by spot and every perp dex that uses it as collateral across all dexes with the same collateral asset most users
Portfolio margin one portfolio of the eligible assets HYPE, BTC, USDC and USDT, with automatic borrowing all cross positions and spot balances together the most capital efficiency
DEX abstraction (discontinued) USDC defaults to the perp balance, other collateral to spot unintuitive on HIP-3 dexes nobody

Standard. usdClassTransfer moves USDC between spot and the main perp balance, sendAsset between dexes. One dex can be liquidated while another holds idle collateral.

Unified. The USDC balance backs validator-operated perps, every USDC-settled HIP-3 dex and USDC spot pairs; USDT likewise. The docs’ risk ratio takes the worst collateral asset:

for each collateral token T with (spotTotal(T) - isolatedMargin(T)) > 0:
  ratio(T) = sum of crossMaintenanceMarginUsed over dexes collateralised in T
             / (spotTotal(T) - isolatedMargin(T))


unified account ratio = max over T of ratio(T)

Portfolio margin. Unified, plus HYPE and BTC as collateral at a loan-to-value ratio, and idle borrowable balances supplied for interest (portfolio margin). It falls back to non-portfolio behaviour when a supply or borrow cap is hit. The docs disagree on its ceiling: account value below $25M (trading page) or $5M (FAQ).

The numbers

Section titled “The numbers”
Item Standard Unified Portfolio margin
User actions per day uncapped 50k 50k
Manual borrow and lend allowed allowed disabled; borrowing is automatic
Builder-code address can accrue fees yes no no
Can activate as an outcome deployer yes no no
Collateral for a perp position that dex’s own balance the collateral asset’s single balance HYPE (LTV 0.65), BTC (0.5), USDC, USDT
Eligibility none none account value above $10k or weighted volume above $5M, with an upper bound on account value
Wire value, user-signed "disabled" "unifiedAccount" "portfolioMargin"
Wire value, agent-signed "i" "u" "p"
CoreWriter action 16 value 1 2 3

Pick the mode that fits how you trade

Section titled “Pick the mode that fits how you trade”
You are Use Because
trading by hand across spot and perps unified one balance, no transfers
running hedged spot and perp, or carry portfolio margin, if eligible spot BTC collateralises a short BTC perp and the two offset
a bot or market maker standard no daily cap; a loss on one dex cannot pull collateral from another
a deployer, builder-code address, or contract that supplies to the lending pool standard outcome deployers and builder-code addresses must; portfolio margin refuses manual lending and auto-supplies idle balances, which fights code that tracks its own supplied amount

The 50k cap counts user actions: a hard stop for an order-heavy bot. Each sub-account has its own mode (sub-accounts).

Setting and reading the mode from code

Section titled “Setting and reading the mode from code”

You or an API wallet set the mode; user may be a sub-account. userSetAbstraction and agentSetAbstraction replace the deprecated userDexAbstraction and agentEnableDexAbstraction.

{"type": "userSetAbstraction", "hyperliquidChain": "Mainnet", "signatureChainId": "0xa4b1", "user": "0x...", "abstraction": "unifiedAccount", "nonce": 1760000000000}
{"type": "agentSetAbstraction", "abstraction": "u"}
  • From a contract: CoreWriter action 16, (address user, uint8 abstraction). Over 3M mainnet blocks all 123 senders targeted themselves; the 30 most recent were contracts, and each got the mode it asked for.
  • Reading: userAbstraction returns "unifiedAccount", "portfolioMargin", "disabled", "default" (never set) or "dexAbstraction". A fresh contract read "default", then "disabled" after setting 1. No precompile exposes the mode.
  • Balances: in unified and portfolio margin, all balances and holds are in spotClearinghouseState; summing clearinghouseState per dex is wrong.
  • Transfers: in those modes usdClassTransfer, spotSend and usdSend fail with Action disabled when unified account is active. Use sendAsset, or agentSendAsset to the same account, with dex "" (main USDC perp balance), "spot" or a HIP-3 dex name. Sends to the HyperEVM need "spot"; "" returns Invalid token (transfers).

Switch before the account holds anything

Section titled “Switch before the account holds anything”

The docs require no open positions, orders or active TWAP orders before enabling portfolio margin. On mainnet, leaving unified failed twice with Cannot disable unified account with open positions, open orders, or active TWAP orders.

For the third mode in depth, see Portfolio margin; for manual borrowing, see Borrowing and lending.