Running a HIP-3 market · Lesson 4 of 5 · 4 min
Setting risk limits
The price decides when an account is in trouble. Your limits decide how much trouble there can be. This lesson covers the limits you set, how Hyperliquid's liquidation works with them, and how to size them against what your order book can actually absorb.
The limits you set
- Maximum leverage and margin tables, per market. They also set the maintenance margin: half the initial margin at maximum leverage. At 10x, initial margin is 10% and maintenance is 5%.
- Open-interest caps, per market in USD (
setOpenInterestCaps), plus a cap for the whole dex. - Isolated-only markets. A market can refuse cross margin, so a loss there cannot reach a trader's other positions.
What Hyperliquid does when an account crosses the line
- Order-book liquidation. When an account's value falls under its maintenance margin, its position is closed into the book.
- Backstop. If the book cannot take it and the account falls under two thirds of maintenance, the position is taken over by the backstop.
- Auto-deleveraging (ADL). If even that is not enough, profitable positions on the other side are closed against it.
- Backstop: all 422 backstop closes happened with the account holding 2.31–3.32% of the position, under the 3.33% line (two thirds of 5% maintenance at 10x).
- Order book: of the 432 long accounts whose position had not changed since that morning, 427 were under maintenance when liquidated; the other 5 had traded elsewhere that day and could not be judged this way.
- ADL: 100 short accounts were closed in a single block at 23:01:09.
- Cross-market contagion: on unified accounts, collateral is shared across markets. HYPE fell from $59.6 to $56.2 that day, and that loss pushed some SK Hynix accounts over the line sooner.
The rules held. The damage came from the price (lesson 3) and from how much open interest sat on a thin market.
See the checks on the replay page.
Sizing caps against the book
A cap is a promise about how much can go wrong at once. A useful test: compare open interest with the orders resting within 5% of the price, on the thinner of the bid and ask sides. Above 20x, closing just 5% of the open interest at once would move the price 5% or more, so a modest wave of liquidations feeds on itself.
- 12 of 162 markets across four operators had open interest over 20x their book within 5%. The largest was 305x.
- One pre-IPO market's cap was raised 20 times in two months, from $3M to $55M, while its open interest stood at 69x its book within 5%.
Every market, every cap change: Risk settings scorecard.
- For each market, write down the book you expect within 5%, and set the first cap from it, not from demand.
- Use low leverage and isolated-only on markets with a thin or unofficial reference price.
- Decide in advance what has to be true before a cap goes up: book depth, number of market makers, days without incident.
- Watch open interest against caps and against the book every day; hip3-ops's
scorecardandwatchdo this from public data.
Next: who holds which key, who is on call, and how to stop well.