About a week ago, we got access to Hyperbeat’s Liquid Banking, which is essentially a suite of products and features designed to connect your onchain and offchain finances.

Hyperbeat is calling the overall infrastructure Liquid Banking, and it includes accounts, payments, credit, savings, ramps, all onchain.

Now, this is an early product, still with invite-only access, and we are just starting to use it. It’s not a deep dive, it’s just a first impressions analysis.

And a reminder, this is still a closed beta product. It’s far from perfect.

You need an invite to create an account using your email, but the more important step is ID verification, aka KYC.

If you did this kind of check at other neobanks, you probably know how it goes:

You will not have a crypto wallet associated with your account right away, so you can decide which wallet(s) to connect later on.

So, you can have wallets you dedicate specifically to this service, for whatever reason you might want.

We did run into a small issue here, with some error making it unable for us to connect the wallet, but support was quick to look into it and fix it.

Depositing fiat was exactly like making any other transfer:

For us, it took just around 10 minutes for the whole process to clear and have the equivalent stablecoin in our account.

Onramping is only possible in USD and EUR from what we can see at the moment and there are some fees or delays, depending on the transfer type you choose.

Takes slightly longer, and it will probably depend on the currency you use too.

Withdrawals are available in many more currencies, not just USD and EUR.

There are some fees for these transfers, but they are generally very small.

And exact timing will again depend on the currency and bank you use. For us, it took roughly 20-30 minutes to see the withdrawal in our regular bank account.

The biggest hidden fees are often the exchange rates offered when you use different currencies.

In this case, we had a good experience. There’s no way yet to 100% predict the exchange rate, but given these two transfers we made as an initial test, the results were good. We can’t say whether or not there is a small spread applied because we had a rather interesting situation:

We don’t know exactly why, and we assume this is not standard.

But we also assume that receiving a better rate also means the true intent here is to have as low a spread on exchange rates as possible.

You can also fund your account with crypto, of course.

Aside from some of the most popular options from the Hyperliquid ecosystem, you can also swap from other chains by choosing “Deposit any token.”

A note: This will check what assets you have available in your connected wallet, and you can only choose to deposit from those assets.

For withdrawals in crypto, you can mainly withdraw on Hyperliquid, with beatUSD additionally available to withdraw as USDC on the Ethereum mainnet, too.

1) Following on our last point, we’d definitely like to see some kind of real-time estimate of our converted funds… What we deposit/withdraw and what’s expected to see on the other side.

2) Card rewards and incentives. We haven’t created a card yet, but it’s just a couple of clicks away to have a virtual Visa card. Still, the current rewards are not worth the extra administrative hassle compared to just withdrawing and using a regular credit card with its rewards.

3) Better clarity on the cash, credit, and yield parts of the portfolio. The UI definitely needs some work there; the documentation is also not clear enough, especially when it comes to being able to easily track it for tax purposes.

4) More detailed transaction history, with exports. This is just very basic at the moment and no CSV export is possible. There’s a button there that’s inactive so we’re sure it’s a matter of time. Still, more details to be able to connect these transactions correctly for tax purposes would be needed for this to become a regular banking solution, rather than just on- and offramping occasionally.

5) USDH for crypto deposit option. Given that this is a Hyperliquid-native protocol, we hope to see USDH as an option to deposit stables to our Liquid Banking account.

All in all, we certainly have a good first impression of Liquid Banking, and it’s something we’d recommend testing out with smaller amounts to see the experience for yourself.