HIP-3 is the Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal that lets third-party “deployers” launch their own perpetual futures markets on top of Hyperliquid’s infrastructure — for almost any underlying asset. This is how you end up trading Tesla stock, gold, or the S&P 500 as a perpetual, cash-settled, with no broker.
Deployers, not Hyperliquid itself
Each HIP-3 market belongs to a “perpDex” run by an independent deployer — xyz (trade.xyz, mostly equities and commodities), io (entropyIO, pre-IPO companies like OpenAI and Anthropic), and several others. Query {"type":"perpDexs"} against Hyperliquid’s public info API and you’ll see the full current list — it changes as new deployers launch.
How the price is actually set
For most HIP-3 markets, the mark price is a median of three inputs: an external oracle price, Hyperliquid’s own order book, and a weighted median of external CEX prices where applicable. This matters because it means the mark price can diverge meaningfully from the oracle price when Hyperliquid’s own market is thin — and that divergence is a genuine, measurable signal of stress, not noise.
Not all HIP-3 markets use an oracle
There’s an important exception: pre-IPO markets deployed via the Hyperp mechanism (used by trade.xyz before a company’s actual IPO) run with no external oracle at all — price discovery is purely order-book driven until the underlying company goes public, at which point the contract auto-converts to a standard oracle-backed equity perp. This is different from entropyIO’s pre-IPO markets, which do use a RedStone-fed oracle from day one.
Why this matters for traders and builders
HIP-3 markets settle in cash, confer no ownership of the underlying asset, and inherit whatever liquidity the deployer’s market has attracted — which for niche synthetics can be thin. Anyone building on top of this data needs to treat oracle divergence and order-book depth as first-class signals, not an afterthought.
Summary
HIP-3 is what makes Hyperliquid’s synthetic asset catalog possible — independent deployers, their own oracles (or none, during pre-IPO Hyperp phases), and pricing that can genuinely diverge from the reference feed when liquidity is thin. Always check the dex, the oracle mechanism, and the live order book before treating any HIP-3 price as gospel.