Decentralized perpetuals exchange and Layer 1 blockchain Hyperliquid is rolling out a new upgrade for its HIP-3 system, the team announced in a Telegram post on Wednesday, Nov. 19.
The upgrade, dubbed “growth mode,” is a permissionless mechanism designed to help HIP-3 deployers launch and attract early activity to new perp markets by slashing all-in fees by 90% or more. Rebates and volume contributions will also be at least 90% lower, the team said.
Specifically, when growth mode is active, taker fees fall to 0.0045%–0.009%, instead of the usual 0.045% charged on Hyperliquid’s main markets. Traders who hit the highest volume and staking levels can pay even less (as low as 0.00144%-0.00288%).
Moreover, these discounts stack with existing perks, like aligned stablecoin collateral benefits and staking-based fee reductions.
The upgrade comes about a month after Hyperliquid launched HIP-3, which enables anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE tokens to create their own perpetual futures markets on the network.
The team’s decision to roll out such an upgrade underscores the importance of making permissionless perps practical. New markets often start out with few traders, but cutting fees by over 90% encourages more users to trade, boosting activity.
Still, Hyperliquid emphasized there will be rules to prevent abuse, including that eligible markets “must be entirely disjoint from existing validator-operated perps to prevent parasitic volume.”
This means markets can’t include BTC or similar assets, crypto baskets or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), synthetic mixes of crypto prices, or any assets that duplicate existing markets (for example, gold is already covered through PAXG-USDC).
The team said this list is not comprehensive, and validators can vote to turn off growth mode for any market they think breaks the rules.
A separate criterion states that deployers must have their “deployer fee scale” set between 0 and 1. Once growth mode is activated for a specific market, the asset has a 30-day cool-down period.
Hyperliquid currently has a total value locked (TVL) of over $4.2 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama. Its native token HYPE is currently trading at $37.30, down 4% over the past 24 hours amid a broader market downturn.
