Hyperliquid’s expanding ecosystem is testing three ways to build on an exchange: use its prices, use its matching engine, or build a separate chain around access to its order book.
In a November 10, 2026 analysis, Owen of GO2MARS’s Web3 research team maps those approaches through Papertrade, Trade[XYZ] and Kinetiq’s Elysium. His central argument is that Hyperliquid’s most important resource is not simply blockspace, but an active, programmable order book. The unresolved question is whether wider use of that resource produces revenue for Hyperliquid—or mainly for businesses built around it.
Historical source context: Published November 10, 2026, at 07:54 UTC+8. Project status and figures below reflect that article, not a subsequent update.
The map: HyperCore, HyperEVM and external builders
Hyperliquid began with an exchange rather than a general-purpose blockchain. According to the article, its team built a dedicated chain because existing networks could not support the trading system it wanted.
The resulting architecture has two main components:
- HyperCore runs the exchange’s order books, matching and liquidation functions. It supports native markets, third-party perpetual markets under HIP-3, and prediction markets under HIP-4.
- HyperEVM is an Ethereum-compatible environment where outside teams can deploy smart contracts. Those contracts can read HyperCore information, including prices, positions and balances, and send trading instructions through CoreWriter.
These capabilities do not mean every application shares the same liquidity. In particular, the article stresses that HIP-3 markets have independent order books: deployers must attract market makers and establish depth themselves.
The infrastructure opened in stages. Hyperliquid’s mainnet launched in 2023, HyperEVM followed in February 2025, and a July 2025 CoreWriter upgrade enabled external programs to send instructions to HyperCore. HIP-3 launched in October 2025. The source dates HIP-4’s launch to May 2026 and its opening to third parties to August 2026.
1. Price access: Papertrade shows both the opportunity and the risk
Papertrade launched on HyperEVM on October 10, 2026, with BTC and ETH markets. It did not route customer orders to Hyperliquid. Instead, it read Hyperliquid’s midpoint price when positions opened and closed, then settled gains and losses against its own USDC pool.
That distinction matters: using Hyperliquid’s prices is not the same as generating trading fees on HyperCore.
The product offered up to 1,000× leverage and issued PAPER tokens when users closed losing positions or were liquidated. The article reports that PAPER had no premine or team and investor allocation; stakers could receive a share of pool income.
Yet the distribution mechanics favored early participation. Tokens issued per dollar lost fell from 100 at launch to 40 after ten hours and about 12 by October 17. By October 20, the largest 1,000 wallets held 88% of PAPER and received 91% of distributions, according to the source.
Other restrictions included a $10,000 minimum position size, no ability to add margin after opening, queues that prioritized larger orders, and reductions to profitable payouts. About ten days after launch, Papertrade made PAPER nontransferable, leaving staking distributions as its use rather than allowing holders to sell it. The team cited the risk that attackers could manipulate prices to drain the pool while profiting from external PAPER shorts.
The article reports more than $1 trillion in notional volume during Papertrade’s first week. But daily revenue subsequently fell from a first-week peak of roughly $25 million to $178,000 on October 22, while total value locked declined by more than 70%.
For ecosystem builders, the case illustrates a lower barrier to launching trading products without constructing an order book. It also exposes a dependency: an application settling against an external market price inherits manipulation risks. Owen reports that, on Papertrade’s launch night, traders moved ETH’s price with large Hyperliquid orders while taking positions on Papertrade.
2. Matching access: HIP-3 brings institutions closer, but not automatically their liquidity
HIP-3 allows teams to deploy perpetual markets on HyperCore after staking 500,000 HYPE. The article reports roughly $665 billion in cumulative HIP-3 volume during its first year.
Trade[XYZ], built by the Hyperunit team, was the dominant deployer. Its share of HIP-3 activity was around 90% for much of the period and approximately 97% in October 2026. Its markets covered equities, indices, oil and foreign exchange; its S&P 500 perpetual had formal authorization from S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Owen attributes that position partly to deployment speed and liquidity provision. HIP-3 market slots were auctioned every 31 hours, and Trade[XYZ] won eight of the 23 slots auctioned in August. Its median interval from onchain market registration to first trade was 3.3 days.
The institutional projects remained conditional
The source describes several routes toward regulated US access:
- Payward and Bitnomial: On September 16, 2026, Kraken parent Payward announced plans to deploy HIP-3 markets through Bitnomial, its CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse. Hyperliquid subsequently identified Payward as its first CFTC-regulated deployer under HIP-3’s access-whitelisting framework. Regulatory approval remained pending in the article’s status comparison.
- ICE and Trade[XYZ]: On October 29, ICE, the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company, announced an investment in Trade[XYZ]. The proposed ICE[XYZ] US market would use Hyperliquid’s matching technology, with Trade[XYZ] designing markets and ICE operating the exchange and handling clearing. The proposal awaited CFTC approval.
- Hyperliquid Strategies: The Nasdaq-listed company, ticker PURR, applied on November 5 to become a futures commission merchant, seeking a regulated route for US customers into HIP-3 markets.
These are distinct from unrestricted adoption of Hyperliquid’s existing offshore markets. Licensed operators would retain responsibilities such as customer admission, clearing and compliance.
The liquidity implication is equally important. Whitelisted US markets cannot simply admit all existing offshore traders and market makers. Even if they use the same matching technology, their order books may need to develop depth separately. As Owen argues, exporting an engine does not necessarily export its liquidity network.
3. Order-book access: Elysium adds a separate execution environment
Kinetiq, described in the source as Hyperliquid’s largest staking protocol, developed Elysium as an L2 settling to HyperEVM. It uses Arbitrum’s technology stack and HYPE for transaction fees.
Its stated targets included roughly 100-millisecond blocks and processing capacity around 100 times HyperEVM’s. That comparison is with HyperEVM, not HyperCore: the article gives HyperCore’s median order-to-confirmation latency as approximately 200 milliseconds.
The source first dates Elysium’s announcement to August 24 and its testnet opening to September 22. Its launch status is internally inconsistent: a timeline lists a November 9 mainnet launch, while other passages still describe that date as planned and mainnet performance as unproven. Full order-book access and direct ordering are also described as staged capabilities, not uniformly available launch features.
The trust trade-off
Elysium’s proposed advantage was faster application execution combined with access to more order-book information. But the article distinguishes the guarantees:
| Area | HyperEVM | Elysium, as described in the source |
|---|---|---|
| Order-book information | Best bid and offer | Planned access to full depth |
| Data assurance | Hyperliquid consensus | Elysium-operated nodes and sequencer assurances; not verified onchain |
| Initial operating model | Shares HyperCore’s validators | Single sequencer with permissioned validators |
| Execution speed | Small blocks around one second | Target around 100 milliseconds |
Settling to HyperEVM therefore should not be read as giving Elysium’s order-book feed identical guarantees to HyperEVM’s consensus-backed data.
Elysium’s proposed asset-development path starts with token-launch platforms and ordinary automated market-maker pools, progresses to professional market-making pools, and eventually leads qualifying assets toward HyperCore spot listings and HIP-3 perpetuals. This was a designed pathway, not proof that assets or liquidity would successfully complete it.
The financial incentives also differ by token. Elysium had no separate token in the source. Half of its fee revenue was designated for buying back and burning Kinetiq’s KNTQ. HYPE would gain gas demand and potentially benefit if activity later reached HyperCore, rather than receiving Elysium’s main revenue stream directly.
Ecosystem growth is not the same as HYPE revenue growth
Owen’s analysis separates infrastructure adoption from token value capture. HYPE is not equity, and protocol revenue is not distributed directly to holders.
The source says approximately 97%–99% of net trading fees went to the Assistance Fund for HYPE repurchases, alongside 90% of ecosystem USDC interest income. It reports more than 48 million HYPE purchased for roughly $1.365 billion by October 13, 2026.
But new applications capture revenue differently:
- Papertrade: Trades settle against its own pool; income benefits PAPER stakers rather than automatically producing HyperCore fees.
- HIP-3: Trading occurs on HyperCore, but fees are split equally with deployers. Most markets also operated with a 90% fee reduction under growth-mode pricing.
- Elysium: Revenue primarily supports KNTQ, developers and Kinetiq; additional HyperCore trading remains a potential downstream benefit.
- ICE[XYZ]: The proposed arrangement awaited approval, and revenue-sharing terms had not been disclosed.
The article’s conclusion is therefore conditional. Hyperliquid was gaining outside builders by opening access, reducing fees and sharing revenue. Whether that expansion ultimately strengthens HYPE depends on how much fee-generating activity returns to HyperCore.
What remains unresolved
The three cases point to a common dependency: outside teams want access to Hyperliquid’s order book, but they use—and pay for—it differently.
Owen identifies two central tests for the next stage:
- Can Hyperliquid charge for the value of order-book access? Free price reads can support profitable external products while increasing incentives to manipulate the underlying market.
- Can regulated and offshore markets preserve connected liquidity? Shared technology alone does not overcome customer-admission rules or separate order books.
For readers mapping the ecosystem, the practical distinction is between an application that borrows a price, a market that actually executes on HyperCore, and a separate chain that adds its own operating assumptions. All three can expand Hyperliquid’s reach. They do not carry the same security guarantees, regulatory status or revenue consequences.
Original source: Owen, GO2MARS Web3 research, via PANews, published November 10, 2026, at 07:54 UTC+8.