Hyperliquid has confirmed a plan that would give eligible US traders access to perpetual futures on the onchain exchange through a permissioned deployment of its HIP-3 framework for builder-deployed markets. The confirmation came in an October 26 post on X, as The Block reported, six weeks after Payward, the parent company of Kraken, first set out the structure in a September 16 announcement.

Payward's second route to US perps

Payward already sells perpetual futures — contracts with no expiry date — to US clients. Since June 15, eligible Kraken Pro users have traded Bitnomial-listed perps on BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP and five other assets through NinjaTrader Clearing, with funding — periodic payments between long and short positions that pull the contract price toward the underlying market — exchanged every eight hours.

The Hyperliquid plan, whose account structure Coindoo covered earlier, keeps that chain of regulated firms and swaps in a different matching engine. The contracts would be listed under Bitnomial Exchange's rules, subject to regulatory approval, and Payward has given no timeline. Bitnomial Exchange is a CFTC-designated contract market — the venue category registered to list futures for US traders — and the CFTC's register lists Bitnomial Clearinghouse as a derivatives clearing organization, the entity that guarantees the performance of matched trades.

The structure would leave Payward running two separate US perpetuals books that compete for the same approved customers. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi addressed the overlap in September, saying the firm lists its own US perps and will deploy on Hyperliquid as well because clients come first. The onchain version adds a public order book where every order and fill is recorded onchain for anyone to inspect. What it gives up, at least at launch, is the head start Kraken's June contracts already have.

A HIP-3 market starts with an empty book

HIP-3 lets outside operators that stake 500,000 HYPE — Hyperliquid's own token — deploy their own perpetual markets on Hyperliquid, with the stake locked for at least 183 days. Each deployment gets its own margining, order books and settings, and starts with an empty book. Payward would use a permissioned variant, written HIP-3*, which adds an allowlist for that deployment alone: only allowlisted NinjaTrader and Bitnomial accounts would be able to trade on it. Hyperliquid's existing markets stay open as before.

Depth in builder-deployed markets is already concentrated. In Payward's own announcement, Sethi said one venue holds 98% of their open interest — the total value of positions still open — and that no registered US exchange or clearinghouse has yet deployed one.

Pricing can lean on the main market. On a HIP-3* venue, the mark price is the median of the deployer's oracle-based price, the matching contract on Hyperliquid's main exchange, and the venue's own best bid, ask and last trade. That keeps valuations and liquidations close to the main market. It adds no orders, though: a US trader closing a large position trades against whatever bids allowlisted market makers have posted, and Payward has not named any.

Firms approved on both venues could buy where a contract is cheap and sell where it is dear, pulling prices together. Only allowlisted accounts can do that on the US side, so the gap between the two markets will depend on how many market makers Bitnomial admits.

What the operator can do after letting you in

Per Hyperliquid's testnet documentation, a HIP-3* deployer can:

• Add or remove an account from the allowlist
• Switch an account to reduce-only, so it can only shrink positions
• Cancel an account's resting orders, or place reduce-only orders on its behalf
• Move collateral from a user's account to another account on the same venue

Standard HIP-3 also lets a deployer set leverage limits of up to 50x, adjust funding parameters, and halt an asset, which cancels all orders and settles open positions at the mark price.

Those tools resemble what any regulated futures operator needs to close out a defaulting client. The open question is the rulebook: when Bitnomial would use reduce-only status or collateral transfers, how long a customer who loses eligibility mid-trade gets to exit, and how collateral comes back. Payward has not published those rules, and the permissioned features remain on testnet.

The terms still missing

Payward has not said which contracts would list first, what leverage or collateral it would accept, or what it would charge on top of Hyperliquid's fees. HIP-3 deployers can add a fee share of up to 300% of the protocol fee and set their own funding multipliers, interest rates and caps. Neither Kraken's eight-hour schedule nor Hyperliquid's main-market rates is therefore a reliable guide.

For a fund hedging a bitcoin holding over three months, funding will matter more than a tighter spread on entry. A rate of 0.01% every eight hours, for example, adds up to about 2.7% over 90 days.

Three things will decide whether the market works: regulatory sign-off, the first market makers Bitnomial admits, and a published funding schedule. Until all three arrive, Payward's Hyperliquid perps are a structure without prices.

Source: Coindoo