Hyperliquid’s open interest has climbed above $18 billion for the first time, setting a new record for the crypto derivatives platform. The figure shows how much money traders currently have tied up in open positions on Hyperliquid, and it marks a major jump from the platform’s previous high.
Open interest reached an all-time high of $18B on Hyperliquid pic.twitter.com/rIVNZywI83
— Hyperliquid (@HyperliquidX) September 23, 2026
Hyperliquid has been here before, on October 9, 2025, open interest reached $14.7 billion. The very next day, it fell 56% to $6.5 billion as the market was hit by a wave of liquidations. Traders still refer to the crash as “10/10.” It took Hyperliquid almost a year to recover.
Two big changes helped drive the latest rise. The first was HIP-3, which lets outside developers create their own markets on Hyperliquid while keeping half the trading fees. Those markets grew from 18% of total open interest in March to more than a third by August. Much of that growth came from markets outside crypto, including contracts tracking the 100 largest public companies, silver and stocks such as Nvidia.
The second was easier access. Coinbase began sending users from its Base app directly to Hyperliquid in mid-August. Comments from US regulators about bringing platforms like Hyperliquid onshore also gave the exchange a level of legitimacy it did not have before.
More crypto trading is moving to decentralized platforms
Hyperliquid’s record looks more like a snapshot of how much crypto derivatives trading has changed. Take dYdX, one of the oldest platforms in this category. As recently as 2023, platforms like it made up just 2.7% of the entire futures trading market combined. By late 2025, that number had jumped to 26%, and the category crossed 1 trillion dollars in trading volume in a single month for the first time.
Hyperliquid is not the only one growing fast inside that change. In September 2025, a rival platform called Aster briefly captured close to 70% of global trading volume in this category, pushing Hyperliquid’s share down to around 10% for a few weeks, before Hyperliquid clawed its position back by early 2026.
Other names like GMX, Lighter, EdgeX, and Paradex are all fighting for pieces of the same growing pie. Even with all that growth, this entire category still only equals about 10% of what centralized exchanges like Binance and Bybit process each day, which means there’s a lot more room left to take from traditional exchanges than has already been taken.
Why US regulators suddenly care about this market
Part of why this category is growing so fast traces back to a decision Washington made earlier this year. Perpetual contracts, the kind of trade driving most of this volume, had spent years effectively banned from US regulated markets, pushing more than 200 billion dollars a day in trading activity to platforms based in places like the Bahamas, Dubai and Singapore.
That changed on May 29, 2026, when the CFTC approved the first Bitcoin linked perpetual contract for listing on a US regulated exchange, paired with new rules laying out how it would treat similar products going forward. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig had flagged the move months earlier, saying the goal was to pull back trading activity that had drifted overseas rather than keep losing it.
The decision doesn’t affect Hyperliquid directly, since Hyperliquid isn’t a US-regulated exchange. Still, it changes the environment around it, making the entire category of trading it specializes in look less like a regulatory gray area and more like a legitimate part of US markets, which tends to bring in exactly the kind of new money and new traders records like this one are built from.
The numbers behind Hyperliquid’s $18 billion record
Viking pointed to how close Hyperliquid is getting to Bitget. He noted that its $18 billion in open interest is now about 99% of Bitget’s. Hyperliquid also holds 11.9% of total open interest, putting it close to becoming the second-largest exchange by open interest, behind only Binance.
That growth is also showing up in user activity. Grinder noted that the number of open positions has passed 399,000, with 316,294 active perpetual traders. He sees the steady rise as a sign that more traders are choosing Hyperliquid as their go-to platform.
Hyperliquid Total Open Position surpass 399K and hit a new ATH
The total number of open positions continues to grow steadily and is now approaching the 400K milestone.
• Open Interest: $18B – new all time high
• Active Perp Traders: 316,294More and more traders are choosing… https://t.co/ENT5k0D0NK pic.twitter.com/VOd9hZsvD8
— Grinder.hl (@Beliukh_) September 23, 2026
The trading activity is also showing up in the platform’s revenue. DMY pointed to Hyperliquid’s $429 million in on-chain revenue between January 1 and September 15, according to CoinGecko.
$18B is sitting inside hyperliquid right now.
Open interest just hit a new all-time high.
And HYPE is trading around $97.
Read those two numbers together.
This isn’t just a token having a good day.
Traders are putting more capital to work on the exchange while the token… https://t.co/sH0g0gYpjF pic.twitter.com/IxJEKTUJGA
— DMY. (@Dmyonhl) September 23, 2026
He also noted that HYPE was trading around $97. For DMY, the $18 billion in open interest matters because it represents the capital currently tied up in longs, shorts, leverage and hedges. It does not mean all those traders are betting on prices going up.
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid has launched trailing stops across its perpetual markets, giving traders a way to automatically protect profits as a position moves in their favour. The order follows the mark price as it reaches new highs for a long position or new lows for a short position, then triggers a market order when the price reverses by a distance or percentage set by the trader.
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