Hyperliquid vs GMX: Fees, Liquidity, Leverage and Which to Use (2026)

1. Hyperliquid vs GMX at a glance

The last column says which venue has the edge on each line. Hyperliquid wins most rows on cost, depth and tools. GMX wins on leverage, collateral choice and how its security is set up.

GMX: docs.gmx.io, gov.gmx.io and arbitrum.gmxapi.io (stats across all networks, market list), read September 26, 2026, 18:10 UTC. Hyperliquid: docs and api.hyperliquid.xyz; volume, open interest, market count and HLP figures refresh at every build and carry their own date. Hyperliquid volume usually runs $4–8B a day on weekdays and less at weekends.

2. How each one works: order book vs GM pools

Hyperliquid runs its own layer 1. HyperCore keeps an order book for every market in chain state and matches orders by price and time, like a centralized exchange. HyperEVM sits beside it for smart contracts. Your counterparty is another trader or market maker. Orders, cancels, funding and liquidations cost no gas. Arbitrum is only one of several places to deposit USDC from.

How GMX works. GMX v2 is a set of smart contracts on Arbitrum, Avalanche and MegaETH. It has no order book. Each market is backed by a GM pool of two tokens, such as BTC for longs and USDC for shorts. A GLV vault spreads liquidity across several GM markets. The pool is the counterparty to every position, and every trade is priced at the Chainlink Data Streams oracle price rather than against a book: longs enter at the oracle’s ask and shorts at its bid. Each trade takes two transactions. You submit a request, and a keeper executes it. You pay the keeper’s gas as a “network fee”, and the unused part is refunded. With Express Trading you sign off-chain and can pay that gas in USDC.

This one design choice explains most of the table above. An order book gives you maker fees, a visible spread and depth that grows with activity. An oracle pool gives you the index price, with only the oracle’s own bid/ask spread, however large your order. The pool then charges for the risk it takes through position fees, borrow fees and price impact tied to its long/short balance. Background: AMM vs order book DEXs.

3. GMX v1 (GLP) vs v2 (GM and GLV)

Many guides still describe GLP, the single multi-asset pool behind GMX v1. That version is gone. GMX’s docs say V1 trading and GLP liquidity have been phased out since July 2025: you can no longer buy GLP, only redeem it. Everything on this page is GMX v2. Each market has its own isolated GM pool, so an LP carries only the markets they choose. GLV vaults bundle several GM pools and shift liquidity between them automatically. For traders, v2 added price impact settled at close, a borrow fee paid only by the larger side, and adaptive funding.

4. Fees: GMX v2 line by line, Hyperliquid in two lines

• Position fee: 0.04% or 0.06% of size, charged on open, close, increase and partial decrease. You pay 0.04% when your trade reduces the gap between long and short open interest, and 0.06% when it widens it. This is not a maker/taker split: it is the same for every order type. TradFi markets have their own rates. Gold, silver, WTI and Brent charge 0.01% / 0.02% during on-hours and 0.04% / 0.06% off-hours.
• Price impact. There is none at entry, because your entry is the oracle price. Net price impact is worked out from the pool imbalance your open and close create, and it is settled when you close. It can be positive, so you get paid for rebalancing the pool, or negative. Negative impact is capped per market: 50 bps on BTC, ETH, SOL and a few others, and 75–1,000 bps on thinner markets. Positive impact is capped at 40 bps. If you pay more than the cap, the excess becomes a claimable rebate after five days.
• Borrow fee. This is charged per second, and only the side with more open interest pays. The rate rises with pool utilization. Many markets use a linear model that reaches its 45%, 50%, 55% or 65% annual tier only at 100% utilization; kinked markets typically charge 45–55% a year at 75% utilization and 100–130% at 100%.
• Funding. GMX uses adaptive funding. The rate drifts up while one side dominates and decays when open interest balances. On Arbitrum, a keeper sets the maximum rate by reading funding on Hyperliquid, Binance, Bybit, OKX, Coinbase and Trade.xyz, within a 15% to 300% APR band.
• Swap fee of 0.05% / 0.07% if your collateral has to be swapped. Single-token pools have no swap fee.
• Network fee for the keeper on every order, including TP/SL orders. The fee for TP/SL orders that never trigger is refunded.

Hyperliquid has two lines instead of six: a taker or maker fee on each fill (0.045% / 0.015% at tier 0, down to 0.024% / 0% with volume), and hourly funding paid between longs and shorts. Full schedule: Hyperliquid fees.

5. Worked example: $10,000 of BTC

A $10,000 BTC position opened and closed with market orders and held for 24 hours, using the rates both venues showed on the morning of September 25, 2026. GMX’s BTC/USD [BTC-USDC] pool showed a net rate of −0.0013% per hour for longs (funding plus borrow) and +0.0008% per hour for shorts. Hyperliquid BTC funding was at its 0.00125%/h baseline, where it still sat on September 26.

Rates move every hour, so treat these as one reading, not a forecast. GMX: app.gmx.io trade page and arbitrum-api.gmxinfra.io/markets/info. Hyperliquid: metaAndAssetCtxs and l2Book.

Reading it. On a one-day BTC trade the two land close together, and the GMX position fee is only 0.04% if you trade against the crowd. That is why “which is cheaper” has no single answer. Hyperliquid pulls ahead in three cases. You use limit orders: $3.00 round trip versus a minimum of $8.00. You trade size: a $1M BTC market buy on Hyperliquid averaged 0.013% from mid on September 25, while on GMX large orders run into the price-impact cap and open-interest limits. Or you trade altcoins, where GMX’s pools are small. GMX’s edge is predictability: you get the oracle price, with only the oracle’s own narrow bid/ask spread, and a known worst case on price impact.

Plug in your own numbers with the DEX fee calculator.

6. Liquidity, volume and open interest

At 18:10 UTC on September 26, 2026, a Saturday, Hyperliquid had $2.90B of 24-hour perp volume across 178 markets. GMX’s stats API, which covers every deployment, showed $94.0M: $53.5M on Arbitrum, $36.1M on GMTrade (Solana), $4.3M on Avalanche and nothing on MegaETH. That is about 31 times less. A day earlier the gap was 12.5 times ($7.62B against $609M), because GMTrade briefly carried $547M. GMX’s Solana volume swings a lot from day to day, while its Arbitrum volume was steadier ($57M and $54M on the two days). The build-time Hyperliquid figure in the table above is $4.03B (October 20, 2026).

Open interest is where you need to read the definitions. GMX reports longs and shorts separately and adds them: $138.5M long + $123.0M short = $261.5M, of which Solana was $207.0M and Arbitrum $51.6M. Hyperliquid’s API gives one open-interest number per market. Summed at mark prices it came to about $13.0B. The two totals aren’t built the same way, as our open interest guide explains, but the gap is still roughly fiftyfold.

For GMX, the number that limits you is available liquidity, not volume. On September 25 the BTC-USDC pool showed about $97M available for longs and $99M for shorts, and the Arbitrum pools held $177M in total. Anything outside BTC and ETH is thin. Hyperliquid’s depth grows with market makers, which is why a $1M BTC order barely moves the price. The venue-by-venue picture is in our perp DEX ranking.

7. Leverage, collateral and liquidation

GMX allows up to 100x on major crypto markets. Its TradFi markets change by session: gold, silver, WTI and Brent allow 100x on-hours and 25x off-hours, QQQ and SPY 50x and 25x, natural gas 40x and 20x, and SPCX 10x. A position is liquidated when remaining collateral, after losses, fees and capped negative price impact, falls below the market’s minimum of 0.25–1% of size. Liquidations use oracle prices, so a brief wick on one exchange does not trigger them. In synthetic markets, auto-deleveraging can close profitable positions if pending profit grows too large for the pool.

Hyperliquid caps BTC at 40x (20x above $150M), ETH at 25x, SOL at 20x and HYPE at 10x. Maintenance margin is half the initial margin at max leverage, which is 1.25% on BTC. Liquidation first sends market orders to the book, and any collateral left after the fill stays yours. See leverage limits by asset and the liquidation price calculator.

Collateral is a real difference. On GMX you choose the collateral token from the market’s pool, for example BTC or USDC in the BTC-USDC market, and the GMX Account accepts USDC, USDT and ETH. GMX’s docs call it a multi-collateral market with linear, USD-based PnL. Posting ETH as collateral on an ETH long adds to your ETH exposure, and your liquidation price then moves with the collateral too. Hyperliquid’s main perps are margined in USDC (HIP-3 markets can use their own quote asset, such as USDT). Portfolio margin lets eligible accounts use HYPE, BTC, USDC and USDT together, with HYPE counted at 65% of value and BTC at 50%.

A reality check on 100x: a 1% move against you wipes out your margin, and on GMX the borrow fee is charged on the full position size while you hold. High leverage on GMX works best for short, deliberate trades.

8. Order types, bots and copy trading

Hyperliquid offers what you would expect on a CEX: market, limit, stop market, stop limit, take market, take limit, scale (a ladder of limits), chase (a post-only order that follows the best bid or ask), trailing stop and TWAP (sub-orders every 30 seconds or more, over 5 minutes to 7 days). Options include reduce-only, GTC, post-only (ALO), IOC and TP/SL. See Hyperliquid order types.

GMX has market, limit, stop market, TWAP and TP/SL orders. None of them rests in a book. When the oracle price reaches your trigger, a keeper executes the order at that oracle price. GMX’s docs warn that limit, stop, TWAP and TP/SL orders are not guaranteed to execute, for example when a fast move skips past the trigger. There is no post-only order and no queue priority, and a stop-loss can lose the race to a liquidation.

Bots. Hyperliquid is the easier home for most automated strategies. It has a public API with agent wallets and a median end-to-end latency of about 0.2 seconds (Hyperliquid API guide). GMX publishes an SDK, REST and GraphQL APIs, and subaccounts for one-click trading, and it describes itself as built for AI agents. It suits slower, directional bots rather than market making. More: best DEX trading bots.

Copy trading. Hyperliquid’s user vaults let you deposit alongside a trader and share their PnL. The leader keeps 10% of profits, must hold at least 5% of the vault, and deposits are locked for 1 day. GMX’s documentation describes no copy-trading feature. See Hyperliquid copy trading and the vaults guide.

9. Safety, decentralization and track record

Neither venue holds your funds in an account in your name, but they carry different kinds of risk.

• Hyperliquid: a young chain run by a small validator set. Hyperliquid has operated since 2023 (its first vaults launched that year). It is secured by HyperBFT proof-of-stake. On September 26, 2026 the API listed 35 validators, 27 active, and the five Hyper Foundation validators held 47.3% of staked HYPE. Its docs list one audit, of the legacy bridge contract by Zellic, plus a bug bounty program. The matching engine runs in the node software, and the docs list no audit of it.
• Hyperliquid incidents. On March 12, 2025 a trader withdrew unrealized profit from a large ETH long and was then liquidated. Hyperliquid said there was “no protocol exploit or hack”, but HLP lost about $4M in 24 hours, and max leverage was cut to 40x on BTC and 25x on ETH. On March 26, 2025, after what Hyperliquid called suspicious market activity in JELLY, a squeeze that left HLP holding a large short, the validator set voted to delist the market and settle it. The Hyper Foundation made users whole, apart from flagged addresses. The intervention protected HLP, but it showed that a small group can change a market’s outcome.
• GMX: audited contracts on public chains. GMX has run since 2021 on Arbitrum, and later on Avalanche and MegaETH, so it inherits those chains’ security. Its docs list V2 audits by Guardian (eight engagements between October 2022 and September 2023, and ongoing reviews), ABDK, Certora, Dedaub and Sherlock, plus an Immunefi bug bounty. Governance runs through the GMX DAO.
• GMX incident. On July 9, 2025 a vulnerability in GMX V1 on Arbitrum let about $42M of the roughly $46M in GLP be withdrawn. According to the DAO’s write-up, the funds were returned after GMX’s outreach, less a bug bounty, V2 was not affected, and V1 was wound down.

In short, Hyperliquid’s risk is concentration: a small, foundation-heavy validator set that can act quickly, for better or worse. GMX’s risk is smart-contract risk plus oracle and pool design. If “more decentralized” is your deciding factor, GMX wins. If execution quality is, Hyperliquid does. Our perp risk management guide covers position sizing on either.

10. Being the house: HLP vs GM/GLV pools

Both venues let you earn from traders, but the risks are not the same.

• Hyperliquid HLP runs the exchange’s market-making and liquidation strategies. It held $179.1M with a 3.5% APR (October 20, 2026), and deposits are locked for 4 days. The March 2025 losses above show its tail risk: one bad liquidation can wipe out weeks of returns.
• GMX GM pools are the counterparty to every trade in their market and receive 63% of trading, liquidation, borrow and swap fees on Arbitrum and Avalanche. When traders win, the pool pays. Each GM pool is isolated, so you only carry the markets you deposit into. GLV vaults spread capital across several markets and shift it automatically.
• Fully backed vs synthetic. In a fully backed market such as ETH/USD on an ETH-USDC pool, the pool holds the asset it pays out in. In a synthetic market such as DOGE/USD on an ETH-USDC pool, GMX’s docs warn that a fast rally in DOGE can make pending profits grow faster than the pool’s ETH. Open-interest caps and auto-deleveraging exist for that case.
• Token exposure. A GM pool holds the long and short tokens, so its value also moves with ETH or BTC, not just with fees and trader PnL.

Which pool is “best” depends on what you want to hold. HLP is a USDC position exposed to one strategy’s PnL. A GM pool is a basket of two tokens plus trader PnL. Compare yields and lock-ups in our DEX passive income guide.

11. Chains, wallets, KYC and access

• GMX on Arbitrum, Avalanche, MegaETH. Connect a wallet, such as Rabby, WalletConnect or GMX’s passkey wallet, and trade with the funds already in it. You don’t deposit first. Gas is ETH, or AVAX on Avalanche. With Express Trading you can pay gas in USDC or WETH instead.
• GMX Account. From Ethereum, Base or BNB Chain you can deposit into a GMX Account that settles on Arbitrum markets. Stargate and LayerZero handle the bridging, so Stargate’s liquidity limits apply.
• GMTrade (Solana). GMX’s stats API lists the Solana deployment, GMTrade, as a network, with buybacks in the GT token rather than GMX.
• Hyperliquid. Log in with an EVM wallet or email, then deposit USDC from Arbitrum, Ethereum, Base or Polygon (5 USDC minimum), or native BTC, ETH or SOL. After that, trading costs no gas. Withdrawing USDC to Arbitrum costs 0.2 USDC plus a tiny HyperEVM gas fee. Setup: how to use Hyperliquid and the deposit guide.
• KYC. Neither venue asks for ID to trade: you connect a self-custody wallet and the exchange never opens an account in your name. That is not anonymity, since on-chain activity is public, and the exchange or on-ramp you fund from will have done KYC. See no-KYC DEX trading.
• Access. GMX’s terms (last modified August 20, 2026) exclude U.S. persons and embargoed or sanctioned territories. Hyperliquid’s terms exclude the United States, Ontario and sanctioned regions. Check the rules where you live.

12. HYPE vs GMX token

GMX (about $8.35 on September 26, 2026) gets 27% of protocol fees through open-market buybacks. Distribution to stakers is suspended: the bought-back GMX sits in the treasury until GMX reaches $90, and stakers build up “staking power” in the meantime. HYPE (about $91.9) is staked to secure Hyperliquid’s validators. Staking rewards come from an emissions reserve, and protocol fees go to HLP and to the assistance fund, which buys HYPE. HYPE staking also cuts your Hyperliquid trading fees by 5–40%. GMX staking gives no fee discount. More: Hyperliquid staking.

13. Discounts and referrals

Hyperliquid: a referral code takes 4% off taker and maker fees on your first $25M of volume. HYPE staking stacks 5–40% on top, and 14-day volume tiers take the taker fee down to 0.024%. Our code is HOLYGRAIL.

GMX: a referral code gives 5% (tier 1) or 10% (tiers 2–3) off opening and closing fees. It does not apply to borrow or funding fees. We do not hold a GMX code (see DEX referral programs compared).

14. GMX vs Hyperliquid: which one should you use?

• Choose Hyperliquid if you trade actively, use limit orders, trade more than a few hundred thousand dollars at a time, want altcoins, spot or sub-accounts, run a bot, or want to follow a trader through a vault. There are no borrow or keeper fees, and a referral discount on top.
• Choose GMX if you want oracle-priced fills with a capped worst case, leverage above 40x on BTC or ETH, collateral in BTC, ETH or USDT, 24/7 gold, oil or SPY perps with leverage that shifts by session, or you want to trade straight from an Arbitrum or Avalanche wallet on audited contracts.
• Beginners will find Hyperliquid easier to follow, with one balance, two fee lines and a visible book. Keep leverage low on either.
• Using both is common. Many traders execute on Hyperliquid and provide liquidity to GM/GLV pools or HLP.

More match-ups: Hyperliquid vs dYdX (another order book), Hyperliquid vs Jupiter Perps (another oracle-pool design), Aster vs dYdX vs GMX, and the full field on best DEXs in 2026. If you are weighing GMX because you want to leave Hyperliquid, our Hyperliquid alternatives guide matches each reason to switch with the venue that does it best. New to DEXs? Start with what is a DEX.

15. FAQ

Disclosure: HOLYGRAIL is our Hyperliquid referral code, and we earn a share of referred accounts’ fees at no cost to you. We have no referral relationship with GMX. Figures come from docs.gmx.io, gov.gmx.io, the GMX APIs and app, the Hyperliquid docs, API and official announcements, and CoinGecko, checked on September 26, 2026. Volumes and rates change constantly. Not investment advice.