Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets surge to nearly 50% of perp volume as onchain stock trading grows

Quick Take

• Early volume suggests real demand for around-the-clock access, but it‘s still a young product category built on an asset class that wasn’t originally designed for continuous trading.
• The following is an excerpt from The Blocks Data and Insights newsletter.

HIP-3, Hyperliquid's permissionless framework for builder-deployed perpetual markets, has gone from a niche corner of the exchange to nearly half its daily volume.

HIP-3's share of total Hyperliquid perp volume has climbed from roughly 2% at the start of the year to around 50% now, coinciding with growing retail appetite for trading equities onchain.

The category is dominated by TradeXYZ, which runs markets like XYZ100 (tracking the Nasdaq-100) and single-stock contracts on names like Nvidia and Tesla, all settled in stablecoin rather than the underlying shares.

Perps leverage mechanisms are a major unlock for volume. Compared to traditional options, perpetuals avoid the time decay that erodes options positions, since there's no expiration to fight against, only funding payments. That structure is arguably more intuitive for retail traders used to simple long or short exposure than options' strike-and-expiry math.

24/7 trading is the other core pitch. Unlike listed equities, these perps never close, so a trader can react to news or earnings the moment it breaks rather than waiting for the next open, though this also means no circuit breakers over a weekend gap.

The underlying stocks themselves still only trade during market hours, so HIP-3 prices outside that window rely entirely on oracle and funding-rate mechanics to stay anchored, an unproven setup relative to traditional 24/7 assets like crypto itself.

Early volume suggests real demand for around-the-clock access, but it's still a young product category built on an asset class that wasn't originally designed for continuous trading.

This is an excerpt from The Block's Data & Insights newsletter. Dig into the numbers making up the industry's most thought-provoking trends.