Reference

Hyperliquid glossary

46 terms, defined in one or two sentences each. Every definition links onward to the guide that works through it properly.

A

Agent wallet: A key authorised to place orders on your behalf without being able to withdraw funds. The gas-free Enable Trading signature registers one, and the API uses the same mechanism.

B

Backstop liquidation: What happens when the order book cannot absorb a liquidating position and equity falls far enough: the position transfers to the liquidator vault, and the maintenance margin is not returned.
Builder fee: An additional fee a third-party interface can charge for routing your order. Worth checking if you trade through an app other than the main one.

C

CCTP: Circle's cross-chain transfer protocol, which moves native USDC between chains. It is one of the supported routes for getting USDC onto Hyperliquid.
Cross margin: A mode where your whole account backs every position. Capital-efficient, but a loss on one position moves the liquidation price of all the others.

F

Fee tier: The band your trading fees fall into, set by your rolling fourteen-day weighted volume. Spot volume counts double toward it.
Funding rate: A periodic payment between long and short holders of a perpetual contract. On Hyperliquid it is charged every hour and the exchange takes none of it.

H

HIP-1: Hyperliquid's native token standard, which defines how spot tokens are created and listed on the exchange through a ticker auction.
HIP-3: The upgrade allowing anyone with enough staked HYPE to deploy their own perpetual market, choosing its oracle, collateral and fee capture. The origin of the equity, commodity and foreign exchange markets.
HIP-4: The upgrade adding outcome markets: fully collateralised contracts that settle to zero or one at expiry, with no liquidation risk.
HLP: Hyperliquid's protocol-owned liquidity vault. It runs market-making strategies, absorbs backstop liquidations, and passes its profits and losses to depositors with no profit share taken.
HYPE: The native token of the Hyperliquid chain. It pays gas on HyperEVM, can be staked for rewards and a trading fee discount, and carries governance weight.
HyperCore: Hyperliquid's exchange state machine: the order books, margin engine, liquidation logic and oracle prices. Trades here pay no gas because they are not EVM transactions.
HyperEVM: An Ethereum-compatible execution environment on the same chain as HyperCore, where the lending, staking and structured-product ecosystem lives.

I

Initial margin: The collateral a position requires when you open it: position size times mark price, divided by your chosen leverage.
Isolated margin: A mode where a fixed amount of collateral backs one position. The most that position can lose is what you allocated, and nothing else in the account is exposed to it.

L

Leverage: The multiple of your collateral that a position controls. It does not change your fee rate; it changes how small a move against you exhausts your margin.
Limit order: An order to trade at a specified price or better. It rests on the book until filled or cancelled, which is what earns the maker fee.
Liquidation price: The price at which your account equity falls to the maintenance margin and the position is closed by the exchange. It is a level where liquidation begins, not a guaranteed exit price.

M

Maintenance margin: The minimum equity a position must retain. On Hyperliquid it is half the initial margin at the market's maximum leverage, so a 40x market requires 1.25% of notional.
Maker fee: The fee charged when your order rests on the book and is filled by someone else. On Hyperliquid it is roughly a third of the taker fee at the entry tier and reaches zero at higher tiers.
Maker rebate: A payment to traders whose maker volume passes a share threshold. At that point providing liquidity is a revenue line rather than a cost.
Margin tier: A band of position size within which a given maximum leverage applies. Larger positions fall into tiers with lower maximum leverage, so they require proportionally more margin.
Mark price: The reference price used to value open positions and trigger liquidations. It is derived from the order book and the oracle rather than the last trade, so a single print cannot liquidate you.
Market order: An order to trade immediately at whatever price the book offers. Certain to fill, uncertain in price, and always charged the taker fee.

N

Notional value: The full value of a position, as opposed to the collateral backing it. Fees and funding are charged on notional, which is why leverage does not change your fee rate.

O

Open interest: The total value of open positions in a market. High open interest with a high funding rate marks a crowded trade, which is where squeezes come from.
Oracle price: An external reference price for an asset, published to the exchange by its validators. Hyperliquid uses it for the funding calculation and as an input to the mark price.
Order book: The list of resting buy and sell orders at each price. On Hyperliquid the book is the blockchain's own state rather than a smart contract or an off-chain database.

P

Perpetual futures: A futures contract with no expiry date. Instead of settling on a date, a funding payment between longs and shorts keeps its price tethered to the underlying asset.
Post-only order: An order flag, shown as ALO, that rejects the order if it would execute immediately. It guarantees you pay the maker fee rather than the taker fee.
Premium: The gap between the perpetual contract price and the oracle price, expressed as a fraction. It is the main input to the funding rate.

R

Reduce-only order: An order flag guaranteeing the order can only shrink an existing position, never open a new one or flip your direction. Worth attaching to every exit.
Referral discount: A 4% reduction in trading fees for using a referral code, covering your first $25M of volume. It can only be applied before your first trade and does not cover vaults or sub-accounts.

S

Scale order: A ladder of limit orders placed across a price range, used to average into a zone rather than guess a single price.
Slippage: The difference between the price you expected and the price you got. It comes from order book depth, not from fees, and on thin markets it dwarfs the fee.
Spot trading: Buying and holding the asset itself rather than a contract on its price. Spot fees are higher than perpetual fees, but spot volume counts double toward your fee tier.
Staking discount: A reduction in trading fees for staking HYPE and linking it to your trading account, ranging from 5% to 40% across six tiers.
Stop loss: A trigger that sends an order when the price reaches a level you set. It limits losses but does not guarantee the exit price, because the fill happens after the trigger.
Strict isolated margin: Isolated margin with margin removal disabled, so collateral cannot be withdrawn from the position once allocated.
Sub-account: A separate trading account under the same wallet, useful for keeping strategies apart. The clearinghouse treats it as independent, so it does not inherit a referral discount.

T

Take profit: A trigger that sends an order when the price reaches a favourable level. The mirror image of a stop loss.
Taker fee: The fee charged when your order executes immediately against a resting order. It is the higher of the two fee sides on every venue, including this one.
TWAP order: An order split into suborders released at intervals, to reduce the market impact of size. On Hyperliquid it needs at least $100 of notional and runs from five minutes to seven days.

U

Unit: The system that brings native assets such as BTC, ETH and SOL onto HyperCore from their own chains, so they can be traded as spot holdings.

V

Vault: A pooled account others can deposit into. HLP is protocol-owned and takes no profit share; a user vault pays its leader a share of profits. Both lock deposits for four days from the most recent deposit.