Hyperliquid, a new crypto exchange specializing in leveraged memecoin trading, has been capturing market share from its well-established global rivals like Binance. Benefiting from two particular features, namely copy-trading and leveraged trading contests, it has attracted disproportionate media attention.
At first glance, certain numbers sound impressive. For example, over the past three months, Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures trade volume has grown 74% from $1.9 billion to $3.3 billion. That outperforms even market leader Binance, which grew 42% in the same category during the same time period.
Using similar metrics that emphasize percentages rather than absolute dollar amounts, some people have started to consider Hyperliquid a legitimate competitor to Binance.
However, on closer inspection, the much larger Binance captured more absolute market share among perpetual futures traders. During these three months, Binance gained $15.9 billion, or 11 times more than Hyperliquid’s $1.4 billion gain.
Use the right numbers and Hyperliquid can take on Binance
Most charts that show Hyperliquid growing impressively relative to Binance make two elementary errors.
First, as mentioned above, these charts often emphasize impressive-looking percentages rather than the far more important dollar amounts.
Second, many creators backdate their charts to early 2024 — before Hyperliquid announced its airdrop or even operated most of the exchange features that are relevant to a comparison with Binance’s operations.
For example, one Dune dashboard sets the start date for its three charts prior to October 2024. Comically, all of its charts start at least a full month before Hyperliquid’s HYPE airdrop that gave the project its first billion-dollar valuation and kickstarted its current features in earnest.
Similarly, someone took the opportunity to post six impressive-looking charts to go viral on social media. Disingenuously, these charts display Hyperliquid metrics rising up and to the right.
Their creator manufactured that trend, of course, by setting the start date to May 2024 — again, long before Hyperliquid launched its governance token and its most popular exchange features.
Read more: Did Binance enable JELLYJELLY leveraged trade against Hyperliquid?
How Hyperliquid actually compares to Binance
In reality, based on most metrics, Hyperliquid is nowhere close to Binance. For example, it claims fewer than 410,000 total users and admits that its active users are a subset of that figure. Binance, in contrast, claims 250 million registered users — 61,000% larger than Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid defaults its stats overview website to a timeframe starting on June 14, 2023. This conveniently guarantees that its activity charts show up-and-to-the-right growth when someone first visits the webpage.
Total volume, liquidations, non-hyper liquidity provider volume, new users, and number of trades are also displayed cumulatively so that these lines cannot, by definition, decrease.
Still, that Hyperliquid has grown to even a single digit percentage of crypto exchange volumes in any global category is impressive. Since its debut in late November last year, Hyperliquid currently ranks among the top 20 derivatives exchanges in the world.
Comparing overall derivatives trading activity, Hyperliquid also boasts a decent amount of volume. It processed about 6% of the trades versus Binance within the last 24 hours: $3.4 billion compared to $54 billion, respectively.
Its spot trading activity remains insignificant, however: $58 million versus Binance’s $8.9 billion.
