Hyperliquid HIP-3 builder venues compared: trade.xyz, Kinetiq, Paragon, Entropy and the rest (2026)

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 lets any team that stakes 500,000 HYPE run its own group of perpetual markets on the Hyperliquid order book. Since October 2025 that has produced the "builder venues": trade.xyz for stocks, indices, FX and commodities; Markets by Kinetiq for US index, bond and volatility perps; Paragon for crypto-native indices, Treasury yields and single stocks; and Entropy for pre-IPO contracts on Anthropic and OpenAI. All trade from your existing Hyperliquid account in USDC; none is a separate exchange.

That convenience is the catch. The deployer, not Hyperliquid, defines the oracle, the leverage and the settlement rules, and in 2026 three deployers have already shut down or force-settled every open position. This guide covers what HIP-3 is, who is live in October 2026, what you pay, and the risks specific to builder-run markets. Some links are affiliate links; the comparison follows our dataset and the venues' documentation.

≡Key takeaways

HIP-3 venues use Hyperliquid's matching and margin engine, but the deployer sets the oracle and leverage and can halt a market and settle it at its own mark.
Standard HIP-3 fees are double the native rate (0.03% / 0.09%), split evenly with the deployer; growth mode cuts the all-in fee by at least 90% on non-crypto markets.
trade.xyz carries almost all HIP-3 volume; Kinetiq, Paragon and Entropy are small, young and have no published audit of their oracle or relayer code.
2026 incidents: one SK Hynix print on trade.xyz liquidated about 960 accounts, Ventuals froze its pre-IPO markets at a 24-hour average and shut down, and Kinetiq force-settled everything in the USDH wind-down.
Use isolated margin, size for a gap at the external market's reopen, and read the deployer's settlement page before holding a position overnight.

What HIP-3 is, and how it differs from a native Hyperliquid market

Hyperliquid's own perp markets are operated by the validator set: the protocol runs the oracle, sets leverage and keeps the fee. HIP-3, live since October 2025, adds a second class. Any deployer that stakes 500,000 HYPE (a figure the docs say is expected to decrease) can create one perp dex with its own prefix, such as xyz or para, and list markets without protocol approval; the first three assets are free, further slots go through a Dutch auction priced in HYPE.

What stays with Hyperliquid: matching, margin engine, liquidations, auto-deleveraging, funding transfers and the API. What moves to the deployer: oracle methodology and contract specification, the live oracle prices, leverage limits and the decision to halt a market. The haltTrading action cancels all orders and settles open positions at the current mark price. Each dex has its own order books and margining. The stake must be held for at least 183 days and can be slashed by validator vote for faulty inputs such as bad oracle prices; slashed HYPE is burned, not paid to traders. In short: Hyperliquid's rails, a third party's rules. The perpetuals lesson covers the contract itself.

Who is live in October 2026

An IOSG Ventures review published on 15 September 2026 counted ten registered HIP-3 deployers, four of them trading: trade.xyz (xyz), Paragon (para), Markets by Kinetiq (mkts, after its original km dex was wound down) and Entropy (io). Ventuals, Felix, HyENA and dreamcash had stopped. In the 30 days to 13 September, trade.xyz took about 97.8% of HIP-3 volume, and HIP-3 as a whole was 25.8% of Hyperliquid perp volume, down from 57.1% a month earlier, mostly because native volume grew. Dashboards list further prefixes registered since (gpu, sekai, ddot, nunchi, aura); we have not verified which have live markets.

The table lists every venue in our tracker on Hyperliquid L1, builder venues next to Hyperliquid's own markets.

#	Exchange	24h volume	Open interest	Taker fee	Max lev	Score
1	Hyperliquid Hyperliquid L1	$5.43B	$11.09B	0.045%	40×	91
2	trade.xyz Hyperliquid L1	$581.6M	$3.87B	0.09%	50×	57
3	Entropy Hyperliquid L1	$27.5M	$77.7M	0.009%	25×	55
4	Paragon Hyperliquid L1	$2.1M	$16.6M	0.045%	20×	50
5	Markets by Kinetiq Hyperliquid L1	$1.6M	$9.6M	0.0081%	25×	52
6	Liquid Hyperliquid L1 · zkLighter (Ethereum L2)	n/a	n/a	n/a	50×	40

Snapshot Oct 25, 2026. Volume, TVL and open interest are each venue's totals across all its chains, not Hyperliquid alone. n/a = no verifiable public source. Score = dexwatch score (methodology).

The gap between the first row and the rest is the honest picture of HIP-3 in late 2026: one deployer with depth, three with a handful of markets each.

trade.xyz: the venue that is most of HIP-3

trade.xyz, live since October 2025, is what most people mean by HIP-3. Its specification index lists around 114 perpetuals: US and Asian stocks, ETFs, equity indices (a licensed S&P 500 contract plus the unlicensed XYZ100), oil, metals and JPY, EUR and GBP, all margined in USDC. Leverage is 50× on SP500 and FX, 30× on XYZ100, 25× on gold and silver, 10–20× on single stocks. Indices, oil, metals and large caps can be cross-margined; FX and most stocks are isolated only. Every market has an open-interest cap.

The markets are not 24/7. US equities trade 24/5 (Sunday 8:05 pm to Friday 8 pm ET), futures-based indices and commodities Sunday 6 pm to Friday 5 pm ET with a daily break, FX Sunday 5 pm to Friday 5 pm ET, Asian stocks on home-exchange hours. When the external market is closed, "discovery bounds" limit the mark to ±(1 ÷ max leverage) around the last reference: ±2% on SP500 and FX, ±3.5% on XYZ100, ±4% on gold, ±5–10% on most stocks, 20% on some volatile names. Suits: traders already on Hyperliquid who want the broadest RWA list and the only HIP-3 books with depth; our RWA perps guide compares it with venues elsewhere.

Markets by Kinetiq, Paragon and Entropy

Markets by Kinetiq launched on 12 January 2026 as dex km with USDH, Native Markets' stablecoin, as its only collateral. When USDH was wound down, Kinetiq settled every open market at mark between 10 and 17 June and redeployed as the USDC-margined dex mkts. Five markets remain: US500, USTECH, SMALL2000, USBOND and BVIV, a Bitcoin implied-volatility index added in September. Prices come from Kaiko, with an internal order-book mechanism at weekends. Growth-mode rates are 0.003% maker / 0.0081% taker, but the markets.xyz front end adds a 0.05% builder fee, so use another interface if cost matters. Suits: index traders who want US500 or USTECH around the clock.

Paragon went live on 2 April 2026 as dex para with crypto-native index perps (BTC.D, TOTAL2, OTHERS), each with a published methodology, and has added US Treasury-yield markets and about two dozen stocks and ETFs priced from Pyth feeds, with hard bounds off-hours. Its fee page gives no numbers, only a 50/50 split with Hyperliquid; crypto indices are excluded from growth mode, so expect the full HIP-3 rate there, and we could not verify the equity rate. Paragon has delisted eight markets since launch, including the ANTH pre-IPO contract in May 2026, without a public post-mortem, and cut maximum leverage from 50× to 20×. Suits: traders who want dominance or altcoin-basket exposure in one contract and accept a small book.

Entropy (dex io) launched on 19 August 2026 with pre-IPO perps on Anthropic and OpenAI plus equities such as SanDisk and Nebius; IOSG reports a seed round led by Ribbit Capital. The pre-IPO oracle blends Entropy's own book (capped at 95% weight) with private-market marks, funding rounds and secondary trades. Prices are company valuations, not share prices. If no listing happens within two years of a contract's announcement, it cash-settles to the six-month trailing TWAP of the mark, and Entropy "reserves the right to make additional changes to settlement criteria". USDC is the only collateral; strict isolated margin is the default on new markets. The US, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore and most EU states are restricted; Germany, France, the Netherlands and Ireland are not. Suits: traders who want a priced view on private AI valuations and read the settlement page first.

Fees: double the native rate, then 90% off

Hyperliquid's native base rate is 0.015% maker / 0.045% taker. A HIP-3 deployer adds a fee share of 0–300%; every venue here uses 100%, so the standard HIP-3 rate is 0.03% / 0.09%, split evenly between Hyperliquid and the deployer, as trade.xyz, Entropy and Paragon all document. Volume tiers, staking discounts and referral rebates apply as on native markets.

Growth mode, introduced in November 2025, is why posted rates look so low. A deployer can switch it on per asset for markets "entirely disjoint" from validator-operated perps: equities, equity indices, FX, oil and Treasury yields qualify; crypto perps, crypto indices and gold do not. It cuts the all-in fee, maker rebates and volume credit by at least 90%, so the baseline taker falls to 0.0045–0.009%, with a 30-day cooldown per asset. trade.xyz publishes 0.003% / 0.009% in growth mode, Kinetiq 0.003% / 0.0081%. Three caveats: growth mode is a deployer choice that can be switched off; fee scales are due to become per-symbol, which allows increases too; and a front end may add its own builder fee, as markets.xyz's 0.05% shows. Compare the all-in figure in the order ticket, not the docs headline (our fee calculator covers the native schedule).

Collateral, margin, oracles and market hours

Collateral. HIP-3 allows any approved quote asset. In practice every live venue now margins in USDC. Kinetiq, Felix and Ventuals used USDH, and all three had to settle or shut when Native Markets wound it down between May and July 2026: a builder venue inherits the lifespan of its collateral (stablecoin lesson). Lower fees for "aligned" quote assets are in the docs, but none was live when we checked.

Margin. Deployers choose per market between cross and isolated. Cross margin lets a bad print on one stock draw on your whole account, which widened the SK Hynix damage; isolated limits the loss to the margin posted.

Oracles. There is no shared oracle. trade.xyz runs its own relayer on institutional data; Kinetiq uses Kaiko; Paragon uses Pyth and its own index calculations; Entropy blends its own book with private-market data. All four switch to an order-book-driven internal mechanism when the reference market is closed, bounded to a few per cent from the last external price.

Hours. Only Kinetiq advertises 24/7/365 pricing. trade.xyz and Paragon follow external sessions with bounded off-hours trading, so a weekend gap in the underlying arrives at Sunday evening's reopen, while funding accrues throughout (see our funding page).

Risks that only exist on builder venues

The deployer can delist and settle. haltTrading settles every position at the deployer's mark, and the docs make this a normal operation. Ventuals announced its wind-down on 15 June 2026, froze OPENAI and ANTHROPIC at their 24-hour average price and settled the rest by 18 June. Kinetiq settled all its USDH markets in June. Paragon has delisted eight contracts. Each time the price was the deployer's and the timing was not yours.
Oracle quality. On 28 July 2026 one SK Hynix share printed 29.96% below the previous close in the opening seconds of Seoul's NXT pre-market. trade.xyz's oracle passed it through, the mark fell 18.7%, roughly 960 long accounts were liquidated and profitable shorts were auto-deleveraged. trade.xyz said the oracle "worked as intended according to its specification" and covered losses as a "one-time discretionary decision". Galaxy Research's view: more oracle providers would not have helped, since all read the same thin book. Full list in our incident timeline.
Thin books outside trade.xyz. IOSG found about 95% of Kinetiq's volume in two index perps and most of Paragon's in one market; a modest order moves these books.
No separate audit. The venues inherit Hyperliquid's engine, where only the bridge has a published audit, and add their own oracle code and deployer keys; none of the four publishes an audit of that layer (audit lesson).
Slashing protects the network, not you. A deployer that feeds bad prices can lose part of its stake, but the HYPE is burned; compensation has so far been voluntary.
Jurisdiction. All four restrict US residents; Entropy's list covers most of the EU, the UK, Canada, Australia and Singapore. A different front end does not change the deployer's terms.

How to pick one, and where HIP-3 is heading

Broadest list and the only real depth: trade.xyz. US index or bond exposure around the clock: Kinetiq, through an interface without the 0.05% builder fee. Bitcoin dominance, TOTAL2 or Treasury yields: Paragon. Pre-IPO AI valuations: Entropy, after its no-IPO resolution page. Before any of them, read five things in the deployer's docs: collateral, margin mode, oracle page, sessions and bounds, settlement rules. Then follow our risk-management lesson: isolated margin, leverage low enough that the discovery bound hit twice would not liquidate you, and no position left open across an external reopen you cannot watch (leverage lesson).

Outlook. Growth mode is staying; Hyperliquid said in August 2026 that fee scales would become per-symbol in the next network upgrade while the growth-mode framework remains. An optional allowlist for permissioned HIP-3 markets has been on testnet since 3 September 2026 with no mainnet date. On 23 October 2026 Hyperliquid said HIP-3 volume would count roughly twice as much toward L1 rate limits in the next upgrade, fee tiers unchanged. Our expectation, not a forecast: prefixes will multiply faster than volume outside trade.xyz. Treat each new one as a new counterparty, not as more Hyperliquid. For venues that are not Hyperliquid at all, start with the alternatives guide.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a separate account or deposit for trade.xyz, Kinetiq, Paragon or Entropy?

No. All four are HIP-3 dexes on Hyperliquid L1 and use the USDC already in your Hyperliquid account. Each dex has its own order books and margining, so positions there are not netted against your native Hyperliquid positions.

What fees do HIP-3 markets charge?

The standard HIP-3 rate is 0.03% maker / 0.09% taker, double Hyperliquid's native rate, split evenly between Hyperliquid and the deployer. With growth mode enabled on a non-crypto market the all-in fee falls by at least 90%, to about 0.003% / 0.009%. Front ends such as markets.xyz can add a builder fee on top.

Can a HIP-3 deployer close my position?

Yes. The haltTrading action cancels all orders and settles open positions at the current mark price, and the docs treat this as a normal deployer operation. Ventuals, Kinetiq and Paragon all used it in 2026.

Are HIP-3 markets open at the weekend?

It depends on the deployer. Kinetiq prices its markets 24/7/365 through Kaiko and an internal mechanism. trade.xyz and Paragon follow external sessions: US stocks trade 24/5 from Sunday evening to Friday evening ET, and off-hours prices are bounded to a few per cent around the last reference.

Is a HIP-3 venue audited?

Not as a venue. The markets run on Hyperliquid's engine, where only the bridge has a published audit, and each deployer adds its own oracle and relayer code, which none of the four has published an audit for as of October 2026.

iHow we rank

Rankings on this page are computed from the dataset behind the whole site: volume and open interest from the venues' own market APIs and public trackers, TVL from DefiLlama, fees and leverage from official documentation. Affiliate relationships never change an order. Anything we could not verify is shown as n/a rather than estimated. Read the full methodology.

Sources

Written and reviewed by the dexwatch editorial team. Some outbound "Trade" links are affiliate links; dexwatch may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Educational content, not financial advice. Spotted an error? Tell us.