From an empty wallet to a position with a stop attached: what Hyperliquid is, how to fund it, which order to use, and what each step costs. About fifteen minutes the first time.
Hyperliquid is an exchange for perpetual futures and spot tokens whose order book runs on its own blockchain. There is no account to open and no password: your wallet is your account, and every order is a signed message. You post USDC as collateral, trade perpetuals with leverage up to each market's limit, and pay or receive funding every hour. Trading itself is gas-free. If perpetuals are new to you, read perpetual futures explained first: funding, leverage and liquidation are the three ideas the rest of this guide assumes.
Hyperliquid's own app and third-party terminals are interfaces to the same order book, so the price, the depth and the fill you get are the same everywhere. What differs is what you can see and how fast you can act. A terminal like WatchCrypto's Hyperliquid trading terminal adds 1-second candles, Binance, Bybit, Coinbase and Kraken data on the same screen, and an order ticket that works from the chart. This guide follows that route; the steps are the same in spirit on any interface.
Open the terminal; the dock under the chart shows a Connect card. Pick Hyperliquid, then a browser wallet, Google or email. You approve two signatures: one authorises a trading key that Hyperliquid itself will never let withdraw, the other is a one-time approval explained on how we make money. With Google or email both happen without a popup. The full walkthrough, with the errors a new wallet can hit, is in connect Hyperliquid.
Send native USDC on Arbitrum One to Hyperliquid. The deposit panel in the terminal does this from your connected wallet, and it is credited in under a minute. Three rules save most first deposits:
More detail, including the exact USDC contract: fund a Hyperliquid account.
Before sizing anything, read four things on the market you want to trade:
| Order | What it does | Fee at the base tier |
|---|---|---|
| Market | Fills now at the best prices in the book. | 0.045% (taker) |
| Limit, good-til-cancelled | Rests at your price until filled or cancelled. | 0.015% if it rests (maker) |
| Limit, immediate-or-cancel | Fills what it can at your price now, cancels the rest. | 0.045% (taker) |
| Limit, post-only (ALO) | Cancels instead of taking, so it can only ever pay the maker fee. | 0.015% (maker) |
Then choose size, leverage and margin mode. Cross margin backs the position with your whole balance; isolated fences off a fixed amount, so it liquidates sooner but a loss stops there. The ticket shows an estimated liquidation price before you send: if a normal day's move would reach it, the size or the leverage is too high. You can check it before you open the ticket with the Hyperliquid calculator. A reduce-only switch guarantees an order can only shrink a position, never open one the other way.
Set the stop in the same minute as the entry. In the positions tab, each position has a TP/SL button: enter a take-profit price, a stop-loss price or both. Both are placed reduce-only at the full position size, the dock shows each level's distance from the mark price and your risk-to-reward as you type, and a stop on the wrong side of the price is refused before it reaches Hyperliquid. The two orders are independent for now, so when one fills, cancel the other. Step by step: your first trade, with TP and SL.
Your position is drawn on the chart as a line, green for a long and red for a short, with the take-profit and stop-loss handles on it; drag a handle to move the order. Funding is paid or charged every hour while the position is open, so a trade that works on price can still bleed on a crowded side. To close, send a market order in the opposite direction with reduce-only on, or a reduce-only limit if you want the maker fee. Withdrawals go back through Hyperliquid with your own wallet's signature: the terminal's key cannot move funds out.
No. Trading on Hyperliquid is gas-free. You only pay network gas on the chain you deposit from, such as a little ETH on Arbitrum to send your USDC.
5 USDC. Hyperliquid's documentation warns that a smaller deposit is not credited and is lost, so always send at least 5 USDC.
At the base tier, 0.045% for orders that take liquidity and 0.015% for orders that rest in the book, lower with volume, HYPE staking or a referral code. Interfaces may add a builder fee, capped by Hyperliquid at 0.1% on perps.
Every hour. A positive rate means longs pay shorts; a negative rate means shorts pay longs.
It is set per market: 40x on BTC, 25x on ETH and 20x on SOL at the time of writing, down to 3x on smaller coins. More leverage moves your liquidation price closer.
Yes. Hyperliquid's app works in a mobile browser, and WatchCrypto switches to a phone layout with a Trade tab and can be installed to the home screen.
Not on WatchCrypto. Your USDC sits in your own Hyperliquid account, and the key the terminal uses can trade but cannot withdraw.