The newest project attracting attention in the Hyperliquid ecosystem is Perps.fun.

If you’ve been in crypto, the best way we can explain this in short is “Pump.fun but with perps on Hyperliquid.”

The goal is to be a perps launchpad, so anyone can go to their platform and launch a perp pair.

Here’s what we need to look at:

HIP-3 lets builders deploy their own perp DEX on the Hyperliquid blockchain if they can stake 500,000 HYPE. You can see this in more detail in the official documentation here.

There are some very successful deployers already, the one standing out the most is TradeXYZ.

It focuses on perps for assets like equities and commodities. It’s already #6 by open interest in the DEX rankings on DefiLlama, it hit a record $4.6B in trading volume on 4th Feb 2026 and $929M OI on 29th January.

They were the first HIP-3 deployer and they are far ahead of the rest at the moment. Other notable names, that we might cover in the future that you should look out for: Markets.xyz, HyENA, Dreamcash, Felix.

Back to Perps.fun.

Staking 500,000 is not that easy. It’s around $15M at the time of writing so the entry barrier is high… Dare we say, it’s high intentionally but more on that later.

Then, the technical know-how is not trivial either.

So Perps.fun is suggesting the following: They will raise the 500,000 for the whole perp DEX, they will help implement the technical details, you pay for the ticker and get 50% of the revenue from the trading pair.

You can see their pitch here.

You might be wondering “Is Perps.fun just putting 500,000 at stake for us to launch stuff?” and well, they are not.

They plan to use a HIP-3 crowdinvesting platform from Kinetiq called Launch.

A quick rundown on Launch, a product by Kinetiq:

We say you stay “mostly liquid” because they plan to raise up to 750,000 HYPE, so there’s a 250,000 liquidity buffer.

The problem is that even with that buffer, you are unlikely to be able to use it as collateral on HyperLend or other lending protocols.

For Markets, the LST is called kmHYPE, and aside from native staking yield, it also provides 10% of the gross revenues from Markets. It’s usable as collateral in an isolated market with HYPE. Not amazing but not awful either.

Perps.fun is planning kpHYPE and giving 20% of the revenue of the DEX. They’ve explained the details here.

Let’s start by sharing what upsides Perps.fun says kpHYPE will provide, then dive into our take on the risks.

kpHYPE will get:

What are the risks?

The first and most obvious risk to us is product-market fit. 

What can you “perpify” that has enough demand to drive solid volume?

Equities, commodities, and forex are better served by more specialized deployers like TradeXYZ and Markets.

Pre-IPO unicorns have been tried by Ventuals, and we’re confident in calling that a failure when looking at OI (open interest), volume, and general feedback on those markets. The fact that the team pivoted to baskets of equities makes us think they agree with this take.

What’s left? Perps.fun team says: collectibles, predictions, squared perps, niche indices, memes, volatility products.

That first item, collectibles, is fresh full of drama from the Trove ICO and pivot. 

Long story short on Trove: wanted to launch a HIP-3 for collectibles like Pokemon cards, CS:GO skins, luxury handbags, etc. Total chaos that ended up with investors in the hole for like $10M. 

Drama aside, what’s the real TAM (total addressable market) for this? Are people looking to trade collectibles, niche indices, and memes to any serious extent? How can people hedge these generally illiquid markets? 

Because funding rate farming and arbitrage are a key part of perps, and why they can work. Hold spot, short perps to be ~delta-neutral and collect funding, or arbitrage funding rate between perp venues.

We are not so confident that it can create the demand needed for this to be a positive HYPE allocation.

There’s also a question of what alternatives we have to allocate our capital.

kmHYPE for Markets gets 10% fees for a deployer doing over $30M in daily volume and with $15-20M OI. It also provides some kPoints, which count for a future KNTQ airdrop.

Even though you cannot mint more kmHYPE at the moment, you can swap on secondary markets at a relatively good rate, all things considered.

The fragmentation on Perps.fun where someone provides the 500,000 stake, someone else provides the “trading pair”, and the Perps.fun team tries to connect the dots, doesn’t seem efficient, and is unlikely to compete at scale with TradeXYZ, Markets, Felix, Dreamcash, and others.

What does success even look like? Without a path to $100M+ per day in trading volume, this is a non-starter, and we just don’t see the path.

So, we aren’t planning to allocate any HYPE here.

Of course, we are still biased and wish them well because any HIP-3 deployer’s success is a success for the Hyperliquid ecosystem in general.

Plus, in this case, because they use Kinetiq’s Launch, our KNTQ position also benefits over time.

But through HYPE and KNTQ we have enough exposure to Perps.fun.