HyperCore Borrow and Lend: Hyperliquid's Native Money Market Explained

Hyperliquid

There are now two completely different things on Hyperliquid that people call lending, and confusing them will cost you money.

The one most traders already know is the DeFi protocol layer: Felix and HyperLend and their peers, running as smart contracts on HyperEVM, each with its own rates, its own collateral list, and its own team.

The other one is newer and lives a layer down. HyperCore, the exchange itself, now runs its own lending book. Hyperliquid's weekly update on 7 September 2026 announced that manual borrowing on HyperCore had gone live on mainnet, following a testnet rollout, and on 18 September Hyperliquid put out a dedicated support FAQ and a public post: supply HYPE or BTC, borrow USDC or USDT, with $269M borrowed at the time of the announcement. This page is about that facility: who gets the manual action and who does not, what the reserves actually look like, how the rate is set, how the Health Factor works, and where it stops.

Who can borrow manually, and who cannot

The same lending book sits under two different front doors, and which one you walk through depends on your account type.

The support FAQ published on 18 September 2026 puts it in one sentence: manual borrowing is supported for Manual (Standard) and Unified Account users, and for Portfolio Margin accounts "borrowing is automated and the manual borrow action is disabled."

So the split is:

• Unified Account (the default for every new account) and Manual (the mode market makers and bots use): you supply HYPE or BTC as collateral, then borrow USDC or USDT as a deliberate action, sized by you. Nothing about your account needs to qualify first.
• Portfolio Margin: the account borrows on your behalf whenever an order needs more than you hold, up to token_balance * borrow_oracle_price * ltv. There is no manual button because the account is already doing it. Portfolio Margin itself is gated: the master account needs either more than $5M in weighted volume or an account value above $10k, and account value must stay below $25M. That ceiling has moved from an earlier $5M alpha cap, so a guide quoting $5M is stale.

Both routes draw on the same five reserves, pay the same rate formula, and are subject to the same caps. The FAQ is explicit that a borrow can be limited by available liquidity and by per account and global caps "even when the account has sufficient collateral."

An earlier version of this page said the facility required Portfolio Margin. That was the framing of the original weekly update, which described the automatic path. The manual path for Standard and Unified accounts is the one the 18 September announcement is about.

The five reserves, read from the API

A POST to https://api.hyperliquid.xyz/info with {"type":"allBorrowLendReserveStates"} on 18 September 2026 returned five reserves and nothing else.

Converted at each reserve's own oraclePx (HYPE at $91.78, UBTC at $80,905), that is roughly $1.50 billion supplied against $287 million borrowed, an aggregate utilization near 19%. Hyperliquid's own post the same day quoted $269M borrowed; the two readings were taken hours apart.

Eleven days earlier, at the first reading on 8 September, USDC utilization was 63.08% and borrowed USDC stood at $262.7M. Borrowing grew about 9% in that window while USDC supply shrank slightly, which is why utilization moved seven points toward the 80% kink.

Two details in that table matter more than the headline number.

The reserves do two different jobs, and the split is total. The two assets with a loan to value ratio above zero, HYPE at 0.65 and UBTC at 0.5, had exactly zero borrowed against them. The three assets people actually borrow, USDC and USDT0 and USDH, all returned an LTV of 0.0. So the book is not a symmetric money market where everything is both collateral and debt. It is collateral on one side, stablecoins on the other, and at this reading no crossover at all. If you supply HYPE here, you are posting collateral, not lending into borrower demand.

The reserve is USDT0, not USDT. The documentation's cap table says USDT. The live reserve at index 268 is USDT0, the bridged variant. They are not interchangeable when you are writing code against this.

How the rate is actually set

The documented borrow rate for the stablecoin reserves is:

borrow_APY = 0.05 + 4.75 * max(0, utilization - 0.8)

where utilization = total_borrowed_value / total_supplied_value, compounded continuously and indexed hourly to match the perp funding interval.

Read that carefully and the shape is a flat line with a cliff at the end. Below 80% utilization the rate is a constant 5%. Above it, the rate climbs by 4.75 percentage points for every point of utilization, so a reserve at 100% utilization would pay 100% APY. There is no gentle slope. There is a floor and then a wall.

That is why every reserve in the table shows the same 5.00%. None of them had crossed it. USDC at 70.06% was the nearest, with 10 points of headroom, down from 17 at the previous reading.

The supply side is the borrow side minus the protocol's cut. The docs say the protocol retains 10% of borrowed interest as a buffer for future liquidations, which implies:

supply_APY = borrow_APY * utilization * 0.9

That is a claim you can check rather than take on faith, so we did. On all five reserves it matched to ten decimal places:

The practical reading for a supplier: your yield is not the 5% headline. It is 5% scaled by how much of the pool is actually lent out, minus a tenth. USDC suppliers were earning 3.153% because 70% of the pool was working. USDH suppliers were earning 0.507% because 11% of it was. HYPE and UBTC suppliers were earning nothing at all, because nobody borrows those.

Where the caps bite

Every reserve has a global supply cap and a per user cap. The documented figures:

Set the live figures against those caps and something does not add up. USDC supply was at 40.9% of its billion dollar cap, with plenty of room. USDT0 was at 4.7% of its 50M cap. But HYPE supply stood at 10,119,868 against a documented cap of 10M, and UBTC at 2,046.93 against a documented cap of 2,000. Both collateral reserves were above their ceiling.

The only reading consistent with that is that the caps have been raised and the table in the docs has not caught up. On 8 September the same two reserves were at 98.5% and 91.0% of those figures, so the ceilings were reached and lifted somewhere in the following ten days. Treat the documented numbers as a floor for the real ones, and treat the pattern as the point: the thing rationing this facility is not demand for loans and it is not the interest rate. It is how much collateral the protocol is willing to hold at any given moment, and that number has been moving with the rollout.

The docs are explicit about what happens for a Portfolio Margin account when a cap is hit: it falls back to non Portfolio Margin behavior, and additional margin has to be posted in the settlement asset regardless. For a manual borrower the FAQ's wording is that the borrow "may be limited even when the account has sufficient collateral." Same constraint, different symptom.

Manual borrowing versus the automatic kind

Portfolio Margin already borrowed on your behalf. When you placed a spot or perp order with insufficient balance, the account automatically borrowed against eligible collateral. That behavior is unchanged, and on Portfolio Margin it is the only behavior: the manual action is disabled.

What manual borrowing adds, for Standard and Unified accounts, is doing it deliberately. It separates the credit decision from the trade: you draw against your collateral, or supply to a reserve for yield, as its own action rather than as a side effect of hitting a button on the order form.

The difference is who sizes the loan. Under automatic borrowing your debt is a byproduct of the order you just sent, sized by whatever that order happened to need. Under manual borrowing you pick the number, up to a ceiling the FAQ states as:

borrowable_amount = supplied_amount * oracle_price * LTV

So 1,000 HYPE supplied at the $91.78 oracle price backs a maximum borrow of 1,000 x 91.78 x 0.65 = $59,657, before caps and liquidity. Half a BTC at $80,905 backs 0.5 x 80,905 x 0.5 = $20,226.

Health Factor and liquidation price

Manual borrowers get a number Portfolio Margin users do not see in the same form. The FAQ defines it as:

Health Factor = (LTV-weighted value of supplied collateral) / (borrowed value) * 100%

Two thresholds matter. You cannot open a new borrow once Health Factor reaches or drops below 100%, which is the point where your borrow equals the full LTV-weighted value of your collateral. Liquidation uses a more generous per asset threshold, (1 + LTV) / 2, which works out to 82.5% for HYPE and 75% for BTC. That is the same 0.5 + 0.5 * LTV figure the Portfolio Margin docs use, arrived at from the other direction.

For a single collateral asset the FAQ gives the liquidation price as:

liquidation_price = borrowed_value / (supplied_amount * liquidation_threshold)

Take the 1,000 HYPE example and borrow $40,000 against it. The liquidation price is 40,000 / (1,000 x 0.825) = $48.48, a 47% drop from the $91.78 oracle. Borrow the full $59,657 instead and it rises to $72.31, a 21% drop. The formula makes the trade-off explicit: every dollar you borrow moves the liquidation price up in proportion.

The interface shows N/A for the liquidation price in four cases the FAQ lists: no collateral supplied, no outstanding borrow, other collateral in the account already covers the debt, or the calculated price would be above the current oracle price. That last one is not a safe state. It means the position is already past its threshold.

What happens when it goes wrong

For a manual borrow on a Standard or Unified account, the trigger is the Health Factor and the per asset threshold described above. Portfolio Margin is more involved. Liquidation there is a generalization of cross margin: every cross margin perp position and every spot balance in the account is margined together. Sub accounts are still separate.

The trigger is the portfolio margin ratio, and the account becomes liquidatable above 0.95. The inputs worth knowing:

• liquidation_threshold(token) = 0.5 + 0.5 * LTV(token), so HYPE at 0.65 LTV has a 0.825 threshold and UBTC at 0.5 has 0.75
• min_borrow_offset is a flat 20 USDC added to the maintenance requirement
• borrow_oracle_price is a median of three sources: the Hyperliquid spot USDC price, the perp mark price adjusted by the USDT/USDC oracle, and the perp oracle price adjusted the same way

Three things about the process differ from a perp liquidation and are easy to get wrong.

There is no market phase. Portfolio Margin liquidations are taken over directly by the backstop liquidator at system address 0xbbb...b. The stated reason is that spot books have less consistent liquidity than perp books. Our liquidation explainer covers the perp path, which does have one.

The order is not deterministic. Depending on which oracle price updates first, either your perp positions or your spot borrows may go first. The docs say plainly that users should not expect a fixed sequence.

Takeover can be partial. Between the partial and full liquidation thresholds, collateral and debt are taken over in 20% slices, stopping as soon as you are healthy again. Below the full threshold, everything with positive LTV goes at once. The backstop converts collateral to the debt asset using a TWAP with a 10 minute half life, inside a slippage width of 3M USDC for HYPE and 300k USDC for BTC.

For builders: CoreWriter and the read precompiles

The weekly update's second half was a reminder that HyperEVM contracts can reach this facility. The reach is real but narrower than the phrasing suggests.

Writing. The CoreWriter system contract at 0x3333333333333333333333333333333333333333 exposes action ID 15, borrow lend operation, with fields (encodedOperation, token, wei) typed (uint8, uint64, uint64). The encoded operation accepts 0 for Supply and 1 for Withdraw. A wei of 0 applies the operation maximally, so Withdraw with zero pulls your full reserve balance. Note what is absent: the documented action carries no borrow or repay operation. A contract can be a lender here. It cannot be a borrower.

Reading. Three info endpoints cover state:

The read precompiles starting at 0x...0800 cover the wider HyperCore state that a lending contract needs anyway: order book prices, spot balances, perp positions, oracle prices. Precompile gas is 2000 + 65 * (input_len + output_len), and an invalid input consumes all gas passed into the call frame. The API guide covers authentication and rate limits for the endpoint side.

The documented design intent is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing. The Hyperliquid docs state that "Portfolio margin intentionally does not bring a full-fledged lending market to HyperCore, as that is best built by independent teams on the EVM," and note that HyperCore lending is not tokenized, though an EVM protocol could tokenize it by wrapping the CoreWriter and precompile calls in a yield bearing ERC20.

HyperCore or a HyperEVM protocol?

They are not competing for the same job.

If your capital is already sitting on Hyperliquid backing trades, the HyperCore facility stops it being idle without moving it anywhere. If you want a lending position as the trade itself, with a wider asset list and a token you can use elsewhere in DeFi, the HyperEVM protocols are built for that, and our yield guide compares the routes side by side.

To use any of this you need funds on the exchange in the first place. Deposit through app.hyperliquid.xyz or follow our USDC deposit walkthrough.

Risks worth naming

Supply yield is not guaranteed and can be zero. HYPE and UBTC suppliers earned 0.000% at this reading. Supplying an asset nobody borrows is a decision to hold that asset with extra steps.

The rate can move a long way, fast. The formula is flat to 80% and then near vertical. A reserve that drifts from 78% to 90% utilization goes from 5.00% to 52.5% APY. If you are borrowing, utilization is the variable to watch, not the current rate.

Caps can push you off the facility mid position. When a cap is hit a Portfolio Margin account falls back to standard behavior and additional margin must come from the settlement asset; a manual borrower simply finds the borrow limited. Either way it is a change arriving from outside your account, and the caps have already moved once since launch.

Liquidation is unfamiliar. No market phase, no guaranteed ordering between spot and perp legs, and a backstop that unwinds on a TWAP. None of that behaves like the perp liquidation most Hyperliquid traders have modeled.

Every figure on this page came from Hyperliquid's public API or documentation on the date stated, and reserve parameters are set by the protocol and change. Check the live state before sizing anything.