The decentralized exchange’s NVDA perp market ranked second only to Bitcoin by daily volume, signaling a shift in how traders access equity-like exposure on-chain.
Nvidia has been generating headlines for reasons beyond its chips lately, and traders are placing their bets accordingly. Hyperliquid’s Nvidia perpetual futures contract reached nearly $2 billion in 24-hour trading volume, ranking second on the platform behind only Bitcoin perpetual futures.
What is actually being traded here
The NVDA perpetual futures on Hyperliquid are cash-settled contracts margined in USDC, offering up to 20x leverage and running around the clock, every day of the week. Traditional equity markets close on weekends. This one does not.
These contracts fall under Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, a structure the platform launched around October 2025 that lets third-party developers spin up markets across asset classes beyond crypto.
The result is a contract that settles on-chain, keeps user assets in custody, and publishes its order book transparently. Hyperliquid’s underlying engine, HyperCore, paired with its HyperBFT consensus mechanism, is built to match the speed of centralized platforms while keeping the architecture decentralized.
Bitcoin perpetual futures on the platform reached around $3 billion in daily volume during the same period, which means NVDA was not far behind the top spot. The primary NVDA perp market carried open interest exceeding $500 million.
Why Nvidia, and why now
The surge in NVDA perp activity correlates with public scrutiny surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, including reports of internal investigations that rattled the stock and sparked significant market volatility. Price moves of between 3% and 10% or more in the NVDA perp have been recorded in connection with CEO-related news.
The 24/7 nature of the contract matters here. When traditional equity markets are closed and news breaks over a weekend, there is typically nowhere for retail traders to act on the information until Monday morning. A perpetual futures contract on a decentralized exchange does not wait for the opening bell.
Hyperliquid’s broader trajectory
Hyperliquid was launched in 2023 by Jeff Yan, formerly a quantitative trader at Hudson River Trading, with a self-funded team. A major airdrop of HYPE tokens, distributing 310 million tokens representing 31% of the one billion maximum supply, took place on November 29, 2024.
The HIP-3 framework, introduced around October 2025, was the structural move that made non-crypto perpetuals possible at scale. By allowing third parties to create and deploy markets, Hyperliquid effectively opened up a category that centralized exchanges have historically owned: leveraged access to traditional financial assets for a global, permissionless user base.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
