Hyperliquid perpetual markets explained

The mark price is the reference Hyperliquid uses for margining, liquidations, triggering take-profit and stop-loss orders, and computing unrealized PnL. The oracle price is a separate reference used to compute funding. Neither one is the price your order fills at, which depends on the order book when the order executes.

The oracle price is a weighted median of prices from centralized exchanges, so it does not depend on Hyperliquid's own market data, and validators update it roughly every three seconds. The mark price is the median of three inputs: the oracle price adjusted by a 150-second moving average of the gap between Hyperliquid's mid price and the oracle, the median of Hyperliquid's best bid, best ask and last trade, and a weighted median of perp mid prices on Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate IO and MEXC.

Before opening a position, inspect the order book, size, leverage, margin mode and available collateral in the live trading screen. During volatile markets the mark price and the order book can drift apart, which matters most for leveraged positions close to their liquidation price.

The total cost of holding a Hyperliquid perpetual is the trading fee on each fill, plus funding paid or received every hour while the position is open, plus any builder fee charged by the interface you trade through. These costs are separate and add up over the life of a position.

Funding moves between longs and shorts, its direction and rate can change from one hour to the next, and Hyperliquid collects no fee on it. Trading fees depend on your rolling 14-day volume tier. Perpex charges only a Hyperliquid builder fee, 0.10% of eligible filled notional under the current setting, on top of the Hyperliquid trading fee. A projected funding payment is not a guaranteed return, and a market order can fill away from the displayed mark price.

The BTC, ETH and HYPE guide pages show selected public market context, such as mark price, oracle price, funding and open interest, together with the time the data was fetched. They do not replace a live quote or an account-specific risk check, so confirm the numbers on the trading screen before you place an order.

Copy trading adds allocation and execution considerations beyond a direct trade, because copied orders are placed after the source trader acts, at the prices available then. Copied orders carry the same Perpex builder fee as your own orders.

Hyperliquid crypto perpetuals are linear contracts with no expiry, where one contract equals one unit of the underlying asset and the underlying is Hyperliquid's oracle index for that asset. Collateral is USDC, there is no delivery, and the contract specifications list no position limit.

Most contracts are USDT-denominated while margined in USDC, and no USDC/USDT conversion is applied. The docs list PURR-USD and HYPE-USD as USDC-denominated because their most liquid oracle source is Hyperliquid spot. The initial margin fraction is 1 divided by the leverage you set, and the maintenance margin fraction is half of the maximum initial margin fraction.

Order size limits depend on the asset's maximum leverage. At the time of writing (October 2026), the maximum market order value is $30M for assets with 25x or higher max leverage, $5M from 20x up to 25x, $2M from 10x up to 20x and $500K otherwise. A limit order can be up to 10 times the maximum market order value.

Cross margin is Hyperliquid's default mode, in which your cross positions draw on one shared pool of account collateral, while isolated margin confines an asset's collateral to that single position. In cross mode, losses on one position reduce the margin available to every other cross position; in isolated mode, the loss is limited to the margin assigned to that position.

You can set leverage to any whole number between 1 and the asset's maximum, which ranges from 3x to 40x depending on the asset at the time of writing (October 2026). Required initial margin is position size times mark price divided by leverage. For example, a 1-unit position at a $60,000 mark price with 10x leverage needs $6,000 of margin. Leverage on an open position can be increased without closing it, and isolated positions let you add or remove margin after opening. A strict isolated mode also exists, in which margin cannot be removed and is released proportionally as the position closes.

Unrealized profit can be withdrawn only if the remaining margin is at least 10% of the total notional position value, so a winning position does not turn all of its gains into withdrawable cash.

A Hyperliquid position is liquidated when account equity falls below the maintenance margin, measured at the mark price. Maintenance margin is half the initial margin at the asset's maximum leverage, which works out to between 1.25% of position value for 40x assets and 16.7% for 3x assets.

The protocol first sends market orders to the order book to close the position, and you keep any collateral left if that close meets the maintenance requirement. For positions larger than 100,000 USDC, only 20% goes to the book at first, and a 30-second cooldown follows a partial liquidation. If equity drops below two-thirds of the maintenance margin without a successful book liquidation, the liquidator vault takes over and the maintenance margin is not returned. In cross mode that backstop takes all cross positions and cross margin; in isolated mode only that position and its margin are affected.

For example, an isolated long of 1 unit at $60,000 with $6,000 of margin, on an asset with 40x max leverage, has a maintenance requirement of 1.25% of position value. Equity falls to that level when the mark price reaches about $54,680, roughly 8.9% below entry, before fees and funding.