Why Hyperliquid? · Why Hyperliquid? · 3/4
How HLP Works
HLP — the Hyperliquidity Provider — is Hyperliquid's protocol vault. It is worth understanding even if you never deposit, because it provides liquidity and runs backstop liquidations on the validator-operated markets your users will also trade.
What HLP Actually Is
According to the Protocol vaults docs, HLP:
- provides liquidity through multiple market-making strategies
- performs liquidations
- supplies USDC in Earn
- accrues a portion of trading fees
Anyone can deposit and share its PnL. Deposits are locked for 4 days after your most recent deposit. As of October 2026, HLP held about $179M (from Hyperliquid's public vault statistics).
Where HLP's PnL Comes From
Market makers profit from the bid-ask spread. If the best bid on BTC is $60,000 and the best ask is $60,002, a market maker who buys at the bid and sells at the ask captures that $2 spread. Repeated across many trades and markets, these small edges add up — when inventory doesn't move against the maker.
HLP also earns from backstop liquidations. Most liquidations go straight to the order book, where anyone can take the flow. Only positions that fall below 2/3 of maintenance margin are taken over by the liquidator vault, a component strategy of HLP, which keeps the remaining margin as its buffer. On average these takeovers are profitable, and on Hyperliquid that PnL goes to HLP depositors rather than to the exchange operator (Liquidations).
The Risks — And They're Real
HLP is one market maker among many on an order book — it is the counterparty only to the trades it fills. That is different from pool-based venues such as GMX or Jupiter Perps, where the liquidity pool takes the other side of every trade. But HLP still carries real risk:
- Inventory risk: In trending markets, a market maker accumulates one-sided positions. If BTC rallies hard, HLP can end up net short and lose money until it rebalances.
- Adverse selection: Informed traders tend to trade against resting quotes when they have an edge, so a market maker's fills skew toward the losing side of those trades.
- Correlation risk: HLP provides liquidity across many markets, but in a crash, markets move together. Diversification helps less when correlations go to 1.
- Backstop risk: In a violent move, positions taken over by the liquidator vault can lose more than the margin buffer.
- No control for depositors: You can't set stop-losses or choose which markets HLP quotes. It's all-or-nothing.
HLP and HIP-3
HLP's liquidator vault handles backstop liquidations for Hyperliquid's validator-operated markets. HIP-3 DEXs work differently: each has its own on-chain backstop liquidator at 0x400..00 + {dex_index}, which takes over backstop-liquidatable positions in assets with cross margin enabled and falls back to ADL (HIP-3 docs).
For an operator, that means two things:
- The liquidity on your HIP-3 book comes from whichever market makers choose to quote it. Plan for how you attract them.
- Your liquidation path is your own DEX's backstop and ADL, so leverage limits, OI caps and oracle quality matter even more.
Next, take the quiz to check your understanding of this module.