Mentioned in This Article
1. Payward's Plan for Regulated Perpetuals on Hyperliquid
Payward, the parent company of the Kraken exchange, has set out a plan to become a deployer on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, offering onchain perpetual futures to clients in the United States. It announced the intention on September 16, 2026. The rollout still depends on regulatory approvals, and no launch date or list of contracts has been published.
The Payward Hyperliquid HIP-3 proposal would, if completed, be the first time a US-registered exchange or clearinghouse has taken the deployer role on the protocol, according to the framing of the plan. That claim reflects the way the project has been presented rather than an independently audited ranking, but it explains why the announcement drew attention among derivatives traders. HIP-3 is the Hyperliquid mechanism that allows outside builders to create and run their own perpetual futures markets on the network.
2. How Would the Structure Work?
The arrangement divides responsibilities among three regulated or regulated-adjacent parties. Bitnomial, a derivatives venture that Payward acquired in May 2026, would serve as the HIP-3 deployer. In that role it would create the perpetual markets, administer them and handle clearing. Bitnomial's exchange side would own the contract specifications, while its clearinghouse side would manage settlement.
NinjaTrader Clearing would act as the futures commission merchant. An FCM is the licensed intermediary that holds customer accounts and funds for futures trading, collects margin and passes orders to the venue. Because NinjaTrader Clearing is registered with the US derivatives regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), its involvement is what ties the onchain venue to the existing US compliance perimeter.
Access would be gated. Only accounts that have been onboarded through the regulated entities and placed on an allowlist would be able to trade. Orders are designed to be executed on Hyperliquid's public blockchain order book, so matching happens onchain, while the compliance checks, such as identity verification, take place when a customer is onboarded rather than at the moment of each trade.
Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi framed the move as a way to give US clients access to onchain perpetual futures while keeping the company within its regulatory obligations. No further detail on timing was provided, and Payward has not said which markets it expects to list first.
3. What Are Perpetual Futures and HIP-3?
Perpetual futures, often shortened to perps, are derivative contracts that have no expiry date. Traders use them to take a view on the price of an asset, frequently with borrowed leverage, without ever owning the underlying coin. Because the contracts never settle on a fixed date, exchanges use periodic funding payments between long and short holders to keep the contract price close to the spot price.
HIP-3 has been live on Hyperliquid's mainnet since October 13, 2025. It lets third-party builders launch perpetual markets of their own, provided they stake a minimum of 500,000 HYPE, the network's native token. In the standard version of the design, anyone who meets that requirement can deploy a market and set its parameters, which makes the system permissionless by default.
Payward's version departs from that model. Instead of open access, the contract rules and participation would sit with regulated companies, and only approved US accounts could trade. Hyperliquid has recently added optional permissioning features that let deployers restrict participation through allowlists, which is the capability a regulated deployer would rely on. Existing HIP-3 deployments are not affected by that option.
4. How Large Is HIP-3 Today?
The scale of HIP-3 activity gives context for what Payward is entering. HIP-3 markets accounted for about 26.7% of Hyperliquid's trading volume in the 30 days ending around October 20, 2026, when total volume across the venue was $64.7 billion. Open interest in HIP-3 markets stood at $3.92 billion.
Activity is highly concentrated. A single builder, trade.xyz, represented roughly 97% to 98% of HIP-3 volume and open interest. A new deployer with access to US customers could therefore change the distribution, though whether it would do so meaningfully is an open question that depends on how many US traders are onboarded and which contracts are offered.
5. Why Did Payward Buy Bitnomial First?
The May 2026 purchase of Bitnomial is what makes the proposal feasible. Owning an entity that can function as both deployer and clearinghouse allows Payward to try to place a decentralized trading venue inside the US regulatory framework instead of asking customers to use offshore products. Without such an entity, a US-facing deployment would have no registered party to take responsibility for market administration.
Payward has said it intends to serve clients in more than 190 countries and territories, but the HIP-3 plan is aimed squarely at the United States. Access to offshore perpetual futures has been restricted for US residents, and Hyperliquid's standard interface limits direct access for them. The proposal layers US compliance on top of Hyperliquid's infrastructure, with the goal of giving American investors a trading environment that avoids the risks associated with offshore markets.
6. What Does It Mean for Traders and Markets?
US users would trade on a public order book alongside other participants, but only after passing regulated onboarding. For a customer, the experience would resemble trading on a conventional futures broker in terms of account opening and margin rules, while the price discovery would occur on a blockchain venue that is visible to anyone.
One structural feature stands out. The 500,000 HYPE staking requirement ties the economics of the deployer to a volatile token. That introduces market exposure that traditional clearinghouses usually do not carry, since their capital is typically held in cash or government securities. How a regulated entity manages and discloses that exposure is likely to be a point of scrutiny.
The wider significance is about convergence. Onchain venues have grown in volume, while regulated exchanges have sought ways to offer similar products to customers who must stay within US rules. A working deployment would test whether the two models can coexist without weakening the compliance requirements or the transparency that attracts traders to onchain order books.
7. Why Do Margin and Funding Rules Matter Here?
Leverage is the feature that makes perpetual futures attractive and risky at once. A trader posts a fraction of a position's value as margin, and if the market moves against the position far enough, the venue closes it automatically in a liquidation. On a venue serving regulated customers, the rules for initial margin, maintenance margin and liquidation are typically set and disclosed in advance, and an FCM is expected to monitor customer accounts against them.
Funding rates are the second mechanism. Since a perpetual contract never expires, the exchange periodically transfers payments between traders on opposite sides of the market. When the contract trades above the spot price, longs generally pay shorts, and the reverse holds when it trades below. In a regulated deployment, the party that administers the market would be responsible for how these parameters are defined, which is part of why the plan places contract specifications with Bitnomial instead of leaving them to anonymous builders.
Oracles add a further layer. A perpetual market needs a reliable reference price to calculate margin and settle gains and losses. Under standard HIP-3, the deployer chooses the oracle arrangement. Under the Payward structure, that choice would belong to the regulated entities, so oversight of the price feed would sit with a company that answers to US supervisors.
8. What Are the Open Questions and Risks?
The plan is a proposal, and several unknowns remain. Payward has not said when regulators might act, whether additional conditions could be attached to an approval, or what range of assets and contracts customers would be able to trade. Until those details are public, projections about volume or revenue would be speculation, and readers should treat any figures about future activity with caution, since none have been issued by the company. The company has also not said how quickly onboarding of US customers could begin once an approval is granted, or how many customers it expects to admit initially.
There is also the matter of how a permissioned market behaves on a network designed around open participation. Allowlisting narrows the pool of traders on the regulated markets, which could affect liquidity compared with fully open markets. At the same time, the markets would settle on a public order book, so participants could observe resting orders and trades in the way they can on other Hyperliquid markets.
For now, the announcement is best read as a statement of intent from a large exchange group that has already acquired the regulated infrastructure it says it needs. Whether the structure can be approved and operated at scale is the question that the coming regulatory process will answer.
9. What Happens Next?
Several milestones will determine whether the plan moves forward. The first is regulatory approval for the Bitnomial deployment, which Payward has said it needs and which has not been confirmed. The second is the choice of which markets launch first, since the product list will shape how appealing the venue is to US traders.
The third is whether US volume changes the concentration of HIP-3 activity. If the regulated markets draw meaningful trading, the dominance of a single builder could ease. If they do not, HIP-3 would remain largely the domain of one deployer. Payward has not provided a timetable, so further announcements from the company or from Hyperliquid will be the signal to watch.