What is HIP-3 and
why it matters for
commodity traders

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 went live on mainnet in October 2025 and has fundamentally changed what trading on-chain looks like. Real-world assets — oil, gold, silver, equities — are now tradeable as perpetuals on a high-performance L1, with deep liquidity, sub-second finality, and 24/7 markets. The largest deployer, Trade.xyz, processes over a billion dollars in daily volume and holds roughly 91% of total HIP-3 open interest. For traders who care about on-chain commodity and RWA exposure, this is the most significant structural development in on-chain derivatives since the launch of dYdX.

The short version

Before HIP-3, listing a new perpetual market on a decentralised exchange required permission from the exchange operator. That worked fine for crypto-native assets but left a giant gap for real-world assets — oil, equities, commodities, FX — that couldn't be permissionlessly listed on-chain in a way that retained 24/7 trading and deep liquidity.

HIP-3 changes that. Any qualified deployer can permissionlessly create a new perpetual market on Hyperliquid for any underlying. The deployer posts margin, configures the market, and provides or sources price oracle feeds. Traders then access these markets through any frontend that supports HIP-3.

The result: a permissionless, 24/7, on-chain derivative market for any asset, settled on a high-performance Layer 1 with sub-second finality and deep aggregated liquidity.

How HIP-3 works in practice

Three roles in the system: deployers, traders, and frontends.

Deployers create new markets. To deploy a market under HIP-3, a deployer posts the required margin in HYPE (Hyperliquid's native token) or equivalent collateral, configures the market parameters (contract size, tick size, initial margin, maximum leverage, funding-rate parameters), provides or sources a reliable price oracle, and takes on responsibility for market integrity. The largest HIP-3 deployer today is Trade.xyz, built by Hyperunit, which has deployed perpetuals for WTI oil, gold, silver, and a growing set of equity names.

Traders access HIP-3 markets the same way they'd trade any other Hyperliquid perpetual: connect a wallet, post USDC collateral, place orders. The mechanics — funding rates, mark prices, liquidations, leverage — work identically to crypto-native Hyperliquid perpetuals. The only difference is the underlying being tracked.

Frontends are the interfaces traders use. Hyperliquid's native UI works. Trade.xyz has its own UI. Third-party interfaces — analytics dashboards, professional terminals, mobile wallets — can integrate with HIP-3 markets via Hyperliquid's API and earn builder fees on routed volume. This is where the frontend layer is becoming the most valuable surface in the system.

Why HIP-3 matters for commodity traders

For decades, trading commodities meant CME, ICE, NYMEX, or a regional exchange. Hours were limited. Margin requirements were heavy. Access required a broker, an account, and often a minimum balance that excluded smaller participants. HIP-3 collapses every one of those constraints.

24/7 markets. WTI futures on NYMEX trade roughly 23 hours a day with a one-hour daily break and weekend closure. HIP-3 oil perps trade continuously. This creates entirely new strategies — weekend-gap plays in particular, where Friday-close oracle prices on equity perps can drift from underlying spot over the weekend, and reopen with a re-pricing on Monday.

Lower minimum capital. A standard CME WTI contract represents 1,000 barrels — at $80 a barrel, that's $80,000 notional with margin requirements of several thousand dollars per contract. HIP-3 oil perps can be traded at sub-$100 notional sizes, opening the market to retail and quantitative strategies that couldn't justify the TradFi minimums.

Cross-asset margin. A trader holding USDC, BTC, ETH, and HYPE as collateral can use the same wallet to trade WTI, gold, Apple, Tesla, and any other HIP-3 market. No separate accounts. No fund transfers. No broker reconciliation.

Permissionless deployment. If you want a market that doesn't exist — natural gas, copper, soybeans, a specific equity — anyone with the margin and the operational ability can deploy one. The market doesn't need to wait for an exchange to approve listing.

On-chain transparency. Every funding payment, every liquidation, every fee is visible on-chain. There's no hidden order flow, no payment for order flow, no privileged market-maker relationships invisible to retail.

The frontend layer is where the value accrues

The most important strategic feature of HIP-3 isn't the markets themselves — it's the builder code system that pays third-party frontends for routing volume. Under Hyperliquid's builder code system, any frontend can attach a builder code to every order it routes. The frontend earns a fee of up to 10 basis points per perp trade, paid on-chain in USDC, with no permission required from the deployer or the exchange.

Phantom, the largest mobile crypto wallet, has reportedly built this into roughly a $100,000 a day revenue stream. pvp.trade, a social-trading frontend, has done over $7.2 million in lifetime builder-fee revenue. This is the same playbook that played out on Solana, where trading terminals — Photon, BullX, Axiom — captured 77% of total DEX revenue. Owning the user is more valuable than owning the matching engine.

For traders, the implication is straightforward: the interface you choose to trade through is not neutral. The right professional terminal can give you better analytics, better execution, and better strategy automation than a generic interface, and it doesn't cost you anything extra — the builder fee is paid by the trader either way.

What's coming next on HIP-3

Six months in, three trends are worth tracking.

First, asset expansion. Trade.xyz currently lists oil, silver, gold, and a handful of equities. Expect natural gas, copper, agricultural commodities, more equities (especially international names), FX pairs, and credit indices over the next 12 months.

Second, new deployers. The 91% Trade.xyz market share will not last. Competing deployers are launching with vertical specialisations — emerging-market FX, specific commodity sectors, single-stock options.

Third, frontend specialisation. Generic aggregators are going horizontal. The opportunity is vertical specialisation: professional terminals built for specific trader cohorts that provide the analytical depth and strategy automation a generalist UI cannot. That's what Lattice is — Proco's professional terminal for HIP-3 commodity and RWA perps. Join the Lattice waitlist if you want early access.

What this means if you're trading on-chain commodities today

Three things worth doing.

Choose your frontend deliberately. The builder fee is paid regardless of which interface you use. The choice is whether you want a generic experience or one built specifically for commodity traders, with term-structure analytics, cross-deployer venue scanning, and programmatic strategy execution.

Understand the funding-rate dynamics. Funding rates on HIP-3 commodity perps behave differently from crypto perps because the underlying is a commodity with its own term structure. Capturing positive funding on a delta-neutral commodity position is a real strategy, and getting it right requires more than just a current funding number — you need term structure, basis to underlying, and historical context. See our follow-up — How HIP-3 funding rates work — for a full breakdown.

Watch the weekend gap. For equity perps in particular, the 24/7 trading characteristic creates predictable dislocations during spot-market closure. The Friday-to-Sunday window on equity perps is one of the most consistently profitable setups in HIP-3 markets — but it requires the right alerts and execution tooling to capture systematically.