Running a HIP-3 market · Lesson 1 of 5 · 3 min
What an operator takes on
HIP-3 lets anyone who stakes enough HYPE open their own perpetual market on Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid runs the order book, matching, margin and liquidations. The operator supplies everything that makes it a market: what is listed, its price every few seconds, and its limits. This lesson is about that split, and what it commits you to.
What you put up
- 500,000 HYPE, staked. It stays locked for at least 183 days after your dex is deployed, and unstaking then takes another 7 days, during which it can still be slashed.
- Your stake answers for how you run the markets. Validators vote, weighted by stake, on slashing: up to 100% for invalid state transitions or prolonged downtime, up to 50% for brief downtime, up to 20% for degraded performance.
- Markets beyond the first three cost an auction. The first three need none; each further market goes through a Dutch auction with the same settings as HIP-1 token listings.
Source: Hyperliquid docs, HIP-3.
What you decide
Each of these is an on-chain action signed by your keys. The names are the ones you will find in the public records.
| Decision | Action | How often |
|---|---|---|
| The price: oracle, your mark inputs, an external reference | setOracle | every few seconds, for as long as the market lives |
| How much open interest each market may hold | setOpenInterestCaps | whenever demand or liquidity changes |
| Leverage and margin tables, isolated-only or cross | listing settings | rarely |
| Your fee share, funding multipliers | deploy settings | rarely |
| The collateral the dex settles in | at deploy | once, in practice |
| Stopping a market and settling it | haltTrading | when something goes wrong, or at the end |
| Which keys may do which of the above | sub-deployers | when your team changes |
What Hyperliquid decides for you
- How fast the mark may move. At most 1% per update, at most one update every 2.5 seconds. If you send nothing for 10 seconds, Hyperliquid falls back to its own mark (BlockSec).
- Liquidation, the backstop and auto-deleveraging. The rules are Hyperliquid's; the thresholds follow from your leverage settings. Lesson 4 walks through them on a real day.
- Cross-margin eligibility. Validators enforce it, and assets that move more than 50% in a day are not eligible.
On 27 July 2026, between 22:57 and 23:05 UTC, trade.xyz's oracle key sent 144 price updates for one market alone, about one every three seconds, each carrying the oracle price, two mark inputs and an external price. That is the job, around the clock: one key, signing a price every few seconds, with 500,000 HYPE behind it.
See every update, second by second: SK Hynix liquidation replay.
- Can you send a correct price every few seconds, for every market, without a gap of 10 seconds?
- Who wakes up when the price feed breaks at 3 a.m., and how fast?
- Can you carry 500,000 HYPE, locked for six months, while volume builds?
Next: who has actually done this, and why most of them stopped.