Is Hyperliquid Reclaiming Value from Deployers? Following HIP-3, Hyperliquid largely outsourced new market creation to third-party deployers. This shifted Hyperliquid from a fully integrated exchange model, closer to Binance or Coinbase, toward a more modular exchange stack, closer to Nasdaq’s position within the broker / market / clearing infrastructure. The result has been a rapid migration of listing activity to deployers. Of the 104 new markets listed in 2026, 98 came from HIP-3 deployers, leaving Hyperliquid-operated listings at only 5.8% of new market supply. HIP-3 markets now represent 37.5% of total Hyperliquid volume. As Hyperliquid expands beyond crypto into equities, commodities, indices, and other RWA markets, that share should continue to rise. However, while HIP-3 deployers have been effective in expanding market coverage, they are also expensive. Under the HIP-3 model, deployers earn 50% of fees generated by their markets. Is that value justified, or is it being leaked? Hyperliquid still owns the exchange infrastructure, settlement layer, collateral base, and most of the flow, with only 3.75% of volume coming from third-party frontends. The deployer role can be reduced to two functions: 1) identifying relevant markets to list, and 2) managing oracle / mark-price infrastructure safely. For niche markets, both functions matter. But for obvious high-volume assets, such as gold, silver, crude oil, the S&P 500, Nasdaq, or top equities, market selection is less differentiated. Oracle setup remains critical, but it is not obvious why Hyperliquid could not internalize that function for the largest and most standardized markets, rather than share a material portion of future non-crypto perp economics with third-party deployers while retaining complete ownership only over its existing crypto products, which should become a smaller share of total volume over time. The obvious counterargument is that this is necessary for Hyperliquid to allow organic competition, since the exchange layer must remain neutral. However, Hyperliquid has already shown it is willing to adopt a dynamic role: provide exchange infrastructure while competing in vertical layers, as we saw when it added HIP-3 markets to its own frontend, removed staker discounts for builders, and launched a mobile app to prioritize its native frontend versus builder codes. HIP-4 looks like the same vertical-integration logic applied to deployment. Unlike HIP-3, where new market creation was outsourced from the start, HIP-4 begins with Hyperliquid-led canonical markets. The stated initial mainnet release is 1-day binary markets on BTC and HYPE, and Hyperliquid has said that canonical markets based on objective settlement sources will be deployed first, denominated in USDH, with permissionless deployment extended later pending user feedback. This gives Hyperliquid the opportunity to internalize the most obvious, high-volume, objective markets first, including BTC/HYPE binaries and potentially other standardized price-linked outcomes, before opening the long tail to third-party deployers. The strategic model becomes: keep canonical markets in-house, capture the blue-chip economics directly, and outsource niche or subjective markets where deployers add real value through curation, oracle design, liquidity coordination, and settlement credibility. Lots of Hyperliquid’s decisions have been leading toward the same thing: capturing more revenue, driving users onto the native platform, and acting both as a market layer while still allowing others to build. But while this may increase Hyperliquid’s future revenue capture, it could also meaningfully raise competition across the deployer and builder landscape.