Asters are coming on strong, but why is Hyperliquid hard to replace?

Despite the aggressive push and massive investments from Perps like Aster and lighter, and even CZ’s endorsements, Hyperliquid is truly hard to replace.

Hyperliquid is a customized L1, currently the most market maker-friendly PERP and L1 in the crypto world—bar none.

The real innovation of Hyperliquid lies in its redesign of the microstructure of the order book, directly integrating trade type recognition into the Consensus mechanism.

This seemingly simple yet disruptive design enforces, at the Consensus layer, that Hyperliquid Nodes must process Cancel and post-only orders first, followed by GTC and IOC orders.

• Cancel: Canceling an offer;
• Post-only order: Maker-only order;
• GTC (Good-Til-Canceled): Valid until canceled;
• IOC (Immediate-Or-Cancel): Immediate execution or cancel;
• For market makers, being able to exit quickly is crucial. During sharp price Fluctuations, cancel requests are always executed before others’ taker requests.

Market makers fear being sniped. Hyperliquid ensures that cancel requests always have priority. When prices fall, market makers cancel their offers, and the system enforces priority processing of these cancels, allowing market makers to successfully hedge.

On the day of the big dump on 10.11, Hyperliquid’s market makers stayed online, maintaining spreads of 0.01-0.05%, simply because they knew they could exit safely.

For other on-chain order books or AMMs, there’s usually a fatal issue. Market makers post offers, and when the market price Fluctuates, they immediately send cancel requests.

But in those few milliseconds before the cancel takes effect, High Frequency Takers (HFT) orders have already arrived, precisely sniping these “stale offers.”

As a result, market makers are forced to quote wider spreads for self-protection—you won’t get much of a bargain from them. But as spreads widen, retail investors end up paying an extra 0.1% per Trade. This is “toxic order flow.”

It may look like there’s a lot of volume, but in reality, it’s just HFTs battling each other, which damages the overall quality of Marketplace liquidity.

This is the problem Solana is trying to solve by building the ACE application to control execution. It’s also a challenge other chains struggle to address, not to mention MEV attacks.

In other words, Hyperliquid defines “what is a good Trade” at the Consensus layer. Market makers can confidently quote tight spreads, knowing their cancel requests will be prioritized.

Takers can no longer rely on a few milliseconds of speed advantage to front-run. That’s why Hyperliquid’s liquidity is actually better during periods of Fluctuation, and retail investor Slippage is lower.

Hyperliquid protects those willing to provide liquidity, gives retail investors the best prices, and leaves no profit for bots that only want to front-run Arbitrage.

Hyperliquid is already defining what kinds of Trades deserve Consensus confirmation, directly raising the level of competition.