Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual-futures exchange that runs on its own high-performance Layer 1 blockchain. Like dYdX, it belongs to the app-chain perps archetype — the whole exchange, order book included, lives on-chain rather than on a shared general-purpose network — but it is best known for two things beyond the technology: a token launch with no venture-capital allocation, and a fee mechanism that continuously buys its own token back out of trading revenue.

The protocol reached mainnet in 2023 and distributed its HYPE token in November 2024. Its rise made it one of the most-watched cases in DeFi for a live debate this wiki covers throughout: where real power and value in a "community-owned" protocol actually sit.

HyperCore and HyperEVM

Per the official documentation, Hyperliquid's state is split into two parts. HyperCore is the trading engine — an on-chain central-limit order book for perpetuals and spot with one-block finality, built to handle order flow at centralized-exchange speeds. HyperEVM wraps that liquidity in a fully Ethereum-compatible smart-contract layer, so builders can deploy apps that draw directly on HyperCore's markets. Both are secured by HyperBFT, a custom consensus algorithm the docs describe as "inspired by HotStuff and its successors."

The design goal is to remove the usual trade-off in on-chain trading: keep the performance and UX of an off-chain order book while settling everything transparently on a chain the community secures.

The HYPE token and the Assistance Fund

HYPE has a fixed maximum supply of 1 billion tokens. Its launch is the part most often cited: roughly 31% of supply went to about 94,000 users in the November 2024 genesis airdrop, fully unlocked, with no allocation to venture investors — an unusually community-weighted distribution for a protocol of its size.

The token does the ordinary L1 jobs — it pays gas on HyperEVM (with EIP-1559 fee burning), and validators stake it (with delegation) to secure HyperBFT consensus. Its signature feature is the Assistance Fund: a large share of protocol trading fees is routed into automated open-market purchases of HYPE. This turns exchange usage directly into buy pressure on the token — a protocol-level analogue of the buybacks dYdX and others adopted, but hard-wired into fee flow rather than voted on each period.

Governance: powerful token, lighter DAO

Hyperliquid is a useful counter-example to the assumption that "on-chain protocol" means "full on-chain DAO." HYPE carries real influence — holders stake to secure the chain and can vote on Hyperliquid Improvement Proposals (HIPs) and on validator-level decisions — but day-to-day direction has stayed close to the core team and the Hyper Foundation, and the protocol has not (yet) devolved treasury and roadmap control to a token vote the way a mature governance-model DAO does. Whether that is a bootstrapping phase on the way to progressive decentralization or a durable design choice is exactly the kind of on-chain-vs-off-chain question the token's market value tends to gloss over.

How Caper approaches this

Hyperliquid shows how much a community can rally around a fair-looking launch and a token that captures fees — and also how far "holding the token" can sit from "steering the organization." Caper is built around closing that gap. Two differences are concrete. First, value comes back to holders as a right, not a policy: instead of a discretionary buyback, every holder has an always-open exit — burn your stake, redeem a pro-rata slice of the treasury. Second, that slice is sized by the same canonical vote weight (t·v)/(V·T) that governs your votes, so the influence you hold and the value you can withdraw are measured identically — there is no gap between the two for a foundation to occupy.