Gold-i, the UK-based trading technology provider, has added Hyperliquid to its MatrixNET liquidity management platform, the company said today (Wednesday), in what it described as the first time the platform has connected to a decentralized finance exchange.
Through a standard FIX API connection, Gold-i’s clients including brokers, proprietary trading firms, and fund managers, can now route order flow through Hyperliquid’s on-chain derivatives venue and pipe that liquidity directly into MetaTrader 5 or other trading platforms, according to the firm.
DeFi Makes Its Way Into Institutional Plumbing
The announcement comes as decentralized exchanges push deeper into territory once occupied by traditional venues. DEXs processed more than $1.2 trillion in perpetual futures every month by the end of 2025, with Hyperliquid holding a commanding share of that volume. The question for firms like Gold-i is how to make that liquidity reachable for clients operating within conventional brokerage infrastructure.
Gold-i says it handles the translation work needed to bridge those two worlds. By normalizing order flow to meet Hyperliquid’s execution requirements, the firm claims clients receive competitive pricing and solid depth at the top of the book while still leveraging the aggregation, smart routing, and risk controls already built into MatrixNET.
Tom Higgins, Founder & CEO, Gold-i
“This was a complex implementation but a significant development for Gold-i,” Tom Higgins, Gold-i’s CEO and founder, said, “enabling us to offer our clients access to a market-leading DeFi exchange. Brokers, prop trading firms and fund managers using MatrixNET now have easy access to Hyperliquid’s on-chain derivatives liquidity.”
[#highlighted-links#]
On-Chain Access Through a Familiar Gateway
Hyperliquid operates on its own purpose-built blockchain, positioning itself as a high-performance decentralized exchange for perpetual futures and spot crypto. The platform claims deep liquidity, low fees, and the infrastructure to support institutional-grade trading – though those are the company’s own assertions.
What Gold-i offers is access to that venue via the infrastructure clients already use, rather than requiring them to engage directly with on-chain systems. The firm says it normalizes the execution flow so that the DeFi layer remains largely invisible to the end user.
The challenge of bridging CeFi and DeFi for institutional clients has been well-documented for years, from compliance friction to counterparty exposure, and plugging a DeFi venue into an aggregation platform does not automatically resolve those concerns.
What Gold-i is betting on is that handling enough of that complexity at the infrastructure level makes the option practical for clients who would not otherwise interact with on-chain markets directly.
Expansion of a Growing Liquidity Network
MatrixNET is already connected to more than 80 liquidity providers and 35 crypto exchanges, according to Gold-i, with recent additions covering multiple asset classes. In February 2025, the firm added Edgewater Markets to the platform, extending access to precious metals, FX, and NDFs. In mid-2024, it integrated Cypator to expand cryptocurrency liquidity options for retail brokers.
For MatrixNET clients, the firm says access comes through the same FIX API interface they already use, with Gold-i handling the order flow normalization on the back end. Finalto embedded MatrixNET into its ClearVision infrastructure in 2023, one of the more prominent third-party deployments of the platform.
Brokers Eye DeFi as Institutional Appetite Builds
The broader question of whether DeFi infrastructure can hold up under institutional demand is gaining urgency. An Ostium executive predicted earlier this year that the global CFD broker market faces serious disruption from decentralized finance within five years, a timeline that is pushing some traditional infrastructure providers to act rather than wait.
Higgins said Gold-i plans to keep adding venues on both sides of that divide. “As interest in DeFi grows, Gold-i plans to support both centralised and decentralised liquidity venues,” he added, “giving clients the benefit of flexibility, efficiency, and seamless multi-venue access.”
How much demand brokers actually have for DeFi-sourced liquidity at scale remains an open question. But by routing it through an interface clients already know, Gold-i is at least removing the on-ramp friction that has kept most institutional players on the sidelines.
