Hyperliquid Hyperps Explained: How Pre-Launch Perps Work (XTEN, PUMP, WLFI)

Most perps on Hyperliquid follow a price that already exists somewhere else. The BTC perp tracks bitcoin's spot price on other exchanges, and funding pulls the two together. A hyperp has nothing to follow. It is a perp on a token that has not launched yet, and its reference price is built from its own trading history.

Hyperliquid's announcements channel records 21 of them since 2023. The newest is XTEN, the token of the perps exchange Extended, listed on October 27, 2026. This guide covers how hyperps are priced, why funding behaves differently on them, what happens when the real token arrives, and the full listing record from Hyperliquid's announcements channel.

What a Hyperp Is

"Hyperp" is short for Hyperliquid-only perp. Hyperliquid's hyperps documentation says they "trade like vanilla perpetual contracts, but do not require an underlying spot or index oracle price." The token only has to exist eventually, for the conversion. Before that, the market sets its own price.

If you have not traded perps before, our perpetual futures guide covers the basics. The order book, order types and fees on a hyperp are the same as on any other Hyperliquid perp. What changes is where the oracle price comes from and how funding works.

Hyperliquid lists hyperps "by community request," in the words of each listing post. They are native Hyperliquid markets, not HIP-3 markets run by an outside deployer. For pre-IPO stocks, the HIP-3 venues use a different approach: the SpaceX perp on trade.xyz traded before the IPO under its deployer's own contract rules.

How the Price Works

On a normal perp, Hyperliquid's validators publish an oracle price built from spot prices on outside exchanges. A hyperp's oracle is different:

• Oracle price: an 8-hour exponentially weighted moving average of the last day's minute-by-minute mark prices. Hyperliquid says this is reported onchain and in the API as the hyperp's oracle price.
• Mark price: the usual Hyperliquid mark formula. Since August 2025 it also includes the median price of the same token's pre-launch perps on centralized exchanges, where those exist.
• Caps: the docs cap the mark price at 3x the 8-hour average, and at 1.5x the outside pre-launch median when there is one. The oracle can't go above 4x the one-month average mark price.

That last set of limits changed over time. Hyperliquid's August 27, 2025 post set the mark cap at 10x the 8-hour average. The current docs say 3x.

Hyperliquid's own description of the result is that it "makes the hyperp price more stable and less susceptible to manipulation, unlike usual pre-launch futures." In practice, the moving average means a sudden spike doesn't immediately become the price that liquidations are judged against. The order book has to stay at the new level for a while first.

On the XTEN screen above, the mark price ($0.2503) sits below the oracle ($0.2594) because the price had drifted down for several hours and the moving average was still catching up.

Funding on a Hyperp

Funding on a normal perp pays one side to close the gap between the perp and the spot price. On a hyperp there is no spot price, so funding is measured against the 8-hour average instead. The docs say premium samples are "1% of the usual clamped interest rate and premium formula."

Hyperliquid's listing posts spell out what that means for traders: "If there is heavy price momentum in one direction, funding will heavily incentivize positions in the opposite direction for the next eight hours." Chasing a pump on a hyperp means paying funding to the people betting against it until the average catches up.

The funding multiplier has been cut twice, per Hyperliquid's announcements:

• February 2024: hyperp funding cut to 25% of the previous calculation.
• August 2025: cut again, from 1/20 to 1/100 of the normal funding rate.

Leverage, Margin and Liquidation Risk

Every hyperp listing post since PYTH in November 2023 has offered up to 3x leverage. The TIA post a month earlier allowed 5x. All of them are isolated margin only, so a hyperp position can't draw on the rest of your account, and losses on it can't spread to your other positions. Our isolated vs cross margin guide explains the difference. The live API marks XTEN as strictIsolated.

The low leverage cap still leaves plenty of risk. On August 27, 2025, the XPL hyperp's mark price rose about 2.5x in several minutes. Hyperliquid's post that day said the chain executed liquidations against the order book first and then fell back to auto-deleveraging, all inside XPL positions, and "the protocol incurred no bad debt." It also said the mark price formula took several minutes of elevated prices before liquidations began, rather than reacting to an instant spike.

When the Token Launches: Conversion

The docs give a single conversion rule. For a hyperp tracking a token ABC, "shortly after when ABC/USDT is listed on Binance, OKX, or Bybit spot trading, ABC-USD will convert to a normal ABC-USD perp." From that point the market uses an external oracle like any other perp, and the leverage cap can change. PUMP and WLFI both went from 3x to 5x when they converted.

How long that takes varies a lot. ANIME converted two days after listing. MEGA stayed a hyperp for more than six months.

One hyperp did not convert. ZRO was listed in September 2023 using a max supply of 2 billion tokens. When the supply was later stated unofficially as 1 billion, Hyperliquid said there was "extensive user confusion" and settled the market a week early in June 2024, one hour after ZRO's first spot trade on Binance, OKX or Bybit. The settlement price adjusted the spot price by actual max supply divided by 2 billion. A hyperp's contract specs matter as much as its price.

XTEN: The Current Hyperp

Extended (XTEN)

Extended is a perpetual futures exchange that describes itself as one margin account for crypto and traditional markets. Its XTEN token had not started spot trading when Hyperliquid listed the XTEN hyperp on October 27, 2026, with up to 3x leverage. It was the first new hyperp in Hyperliquid's announcements channel since LIT in December 2025.

Source: Extended, used under fair use for educational purposes

Market data from Hyperliquid's API on October 28, 2026, at 10:27 UTC:

Hyperliquid's listing post says XTEN "will convert to a vanilla perp upon CEX listing." Until then, the warnings above apply in full.

Source: Hyperliquid Announcements on Telegram, October 27, 2026

Every Hyperp So Far

Dates come from Hyperliquid's announcements channel. Where the channel only mentions a conversion in a weekly recap, the date is the recap's.

PUMP is the one Hyperliquid points to most. Its July 15, 2025 post said Hyperliquid was "the first major venue to offer PUMP prelaunch trading," with over $400M in open interest and $600M in 24-hour volume before the token launched.

How to Trade a Hyperp

The steps are the same as for any perp. Our beginner trading guide walks through account setup if you need it.

1. Open the market on app.hyperliquid.xyz, for example /trade/XTEN. The leverage button shows the 3x limit, and margin is already set to isolated.
2. Set your size and leverage. Lower leverage gives the position more room before liquidation.
3. Check the funding rate and how far the mark price is from the oracle. A mark well above the oracle means longs are likely paying.
4. Use a limit order rather than a market order. Pre-launch books are thin, and our slippage guide shows what a market order can cost on one.
5. Watch for the conversion. Once the token lists for spot on Binance, OKX or Bybit, the contract starts tracking an external price, which can be very different from where the hyperp traded.

Bots can trade hyperps through the Hyperliquid API with the same order actions as other perps. Nothing in the meta response labels a market as a hyperp, so the announcements channel is the reliable source.