HyENA is a USDe-margined perpetuals DEX built on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 standard. HyENA combines the proven high-performance and user-friendly features of Hyperliquid with USDe as trading collateral.
Users that trade on HyENA will earn while they trade thanks to rewards on their USDe margin collateral. This functionality has become hugely popular on exchanges like Binance and Bybit, which saw billions of dollars of inflows and users earning millions worth of rewards on their USDe collateral that would otherwise have been internalized directly by stablecoin issuers.
By bringing this functionality on chain, idle margin becomes productive, redirecting value capture from issuers to the community and potentially unlocking billions in user created value.
HyENA’s main contributor is Based, the highest revenue Hyperliquid platform and builder of trading and prediction market interfaces. HyENA is built directly on the two core primitives of Hyperliquid and Ethena.
HyENA Summary
Over the last year, the Hyperliquid community has increasingly understood that collateral economics should flow back to traders and the Hyperliquid ecosystem, culminating in the high-profile USDH governance vote.
HIP-3, Hyperliquid's latest protocol upgrade, allows any entity with 500k staked HYPE to deploy and launch custom markets on Hyperliquid. Parameters of HIP-3 perpetuals can be configured, including the base asset (numerator) and quote asset (denominator) in a trading pair. HyENA has leveraged the HIP-3 standard to enable USDe as collateral, in conjunction with a program providing users with rewards on their collateral balances.
HyENA’s USDe-denominator design directly addresses the community’s preference made clear during the USDH vote by returning economics back to traders and the Hyperliquid ecosystem, reducing effective trading costs and offsetting funding fees.
Benefits of USDe as margin collateral include:
- Frees trading desks from the zero-economics drag of typical stablecoins, aligning collateral with financing costs
- Minimizing or eliminating opportunity costs tied to USD stablecoin collateral, improving user stickiness, and providing an additional earning use case beyond trading activities
- Reducing risk of funding mismatch between the rates on posted collateral and market maker’s / dealer’s financing costs
- Facilitating positive-carry trading strategies across exchanges where collateral economics might exceed funding costs on certain contracts
- Creating strictly better all-in basis returns versus USDC margined markets where you can earn on both legs of the trade via the USDe collateral as well as the short hedge via funding rates.
- Stabilizing perpetual swap funding rates as the opportunity cost of performing the delta-neutral cash-and-carry is significantly lowered with USDe-margin
- Increased willingness to post more margin, particularly for longer-duration or lower liquidity markets (such as Hyperps / pre-markets), reducing liquidation risks
HyENA markets are secured by Valantis and their product stHYPE, a Hyperliquid liquid staking token (LST).
Trading on HyENA
Trading on HyENA will feel almost identical to trading USDC margined markets on Hyperliquid.
Users can use their existing Hyperliquid account for HyENA. Users will simply need to hold USDe in their account to trade HyENA perps.
HyENA’s frontend will display various options users can use to deposit to fund their trading account. USDe can also be acquired through the Hyperliquid spot market or through Stargate (powered by Layerzero).
To ensure HyENA is rolled out appropriately, HyENA’s front-end will initially be limited to users who are invited via a referral code. HyENA plans to fully launch to the public after battle-testing, and enable every user the ability to generate their own referral code.
HyENA will initially launch with major trading pairs - HYPE-USDE, BTC-USDE, ETH-USDE, SOL-USDE, and more. HyENA will launch with Open Interest caps across all perps and will gradually lift caps as HyENA perps scale.
HLPe - a New DeFi Primitive
Trading provides three core sources of revenue outside of the transaction fees: funding rates, market making, and liquidations.
HyENA Liquidity Provider Vault (HLPe) delivers the whole stack in a single primitive.
HLPe is created to help users participate in fee streams generated from HyENA. Depositors share in the vault PnL and receive a portion of HyENA trading fees, alongside rewards on USDe held in the vault from HyENA.
HLPe is managed through a HyperEVM vault deployed by Upshift. User deposits on HyperEVM are routed to HyperCore where the vault manager executes trades via a Fordefi MPC wallet.
HLPe will launch in phases. The first phase will be a guarded launch with conservative deposit caps, allowing the team to validate execution, risk controls, and fee capture before scaling. During this period, performance may be more muted as the vault address scales into higher fee tiers and liquidity builds. Subject to performance and a cautious risk review, HLPe will then progress into subsequent phases with progressively higher caps and broader access, ultimately opening to the public while preserving a focus on stability and performance.
Holding HLPe is rewarded with 5x Upshift points, and 70x Ethena Points for Ethena’s Season 5 points program for the first month then 50x Ethena Points afterwards.
HLPe is designed to be composable collateral and is intended to be exportable into the broader Hyperliquid ecosystem and DeFi on mainnet, helping make HyENA a natural destination for deep liquidity.
It’s Hunting Season
Hunting season begins as HyENA launches with multiple programs and primitives, providing users multiple ways to earn.
No Cost Migration from Any Exchange
To celebrate launch, HyENA is turning the first 7 days of any user’s trading into a “fee-free migration window” for HyENA perps.
During this period, new users trading USDe-margined perp positions on HyENA’s HIP-3 markets will be eligible for a trading fee rebate on new positions that are intended to be migrated from CEXs/DEXs. Rebates are sized to approximate the trading fees incurred from closing elsewhere and reopening on HyENA. Rebates are expected to be processed retroactively around one month after the end of each account’s 7-day fee-free migration window.
This promotion will last for two weeks.
This program is designed to offset the trading costs of rotating positions from other venues to HyENA, without requiring direct fee or position tracking on those venues. HyENA reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to reduce or deny rebates for users or strategies deemed to be gaming or abusing the program (including activity inconsistent with normal trading behavior).
To help existing Hyperliquid users transition to HyENA, the HyENA app also includes a Position Migrator for eligible positions. If your position qualifies, you’ll see a migration prompt, or you can click “Migrate Position” in the top-right of the HyENA interface.
Note: Users with existing positions that partially migrate may see maintenance margin decrease on Hypercore’s validator-operated perps (Hyperliquid’s main perps), which can reduce liquidation buffer. Please monitor validator-operated perps positions and margin accordingly.
Boosted Rewards
Boosted Rewards offer 12% APY on eligible USDe margin during HyENA’s initial month. Users earn rewards only while a qualifying long position is open, and only if it remains open for more than one hour. Rewards accrue pro-rata during the time the position is open and stop accruing immediately when it is closed. At any moment, the eligible amount is the smaller of a user’s total USDe on HyENA and net long notional amount. Eligibility also requires meeting a minimal weekly HyENA points threshold to better target the program to real users, which all organic, active users should be able to meet. Rewards are claimable weekly alongside the points update on Hyperliquid.
HyENA Points
HyENA is launching with HyENA points, a six-month program rewarding organic trading activity using USDe as core collateral on HyENA.
Each week, 100,000,000 HyENA points are distributed across eligible users, with results posted to leaderboards and account dashboards after each epoch. There will be 24 epochs, with each epoch lasting a week.
At the end of this points campaign, HyENA points will be eligible for a new Ethena points category called “Ethena Exchange Points”, as part of Ethena’s rewards program to help promote USDe as collateral across exchanges.
For the sake of clarity: There will not be a separate “HyENA token”
To preserve integrity, anti-gaming protections exclude self-trades, circular volume, and other manipulative patterns; per-account caps and post-distribution reviews may apply. Ethena may refine parameters, apply filters, or claw back awards to ensure the program continues to favor genuine usage as market conditions evolve.