Wallet Integration of Hyperliquid: Analyzing Retained Profit Advantages and Disadvantages in 2025

The question dominating the wallet and exchange industry in 2025 is deceptively simple: should platforms integrate Hyperliquid’s perpetual trading capabilities? Behind this question lies a complex calculus of retained profit advantages and disadvantages—one that most platforms are still struggling to balance.

Why Everyone Is Racing to Integrate Hyperliquid

When MetaMask announced its integration with Hyperliquid, followed swiftly by Phantom, Rabby, and others, it appeared to signal a gold-rush moment reminiscent of DeFi Summer. Each platform seemed convinced that capturing perpetual trading functionality would drive user growth and generate substantial revenue through the platform’s builder fee and referral mechanism.

The numbers initially looked compelling. Some projects reported rebates exceeding $10 million since the mechanism’s launch. Hyperliquid’s builder fee structure—which allows platforms to charge an additional service fee without increasing costs for users—appeared to be a groundbreaking design, similar to Uniswap V4’s hook system. On paper, this seemed like free money for platforms willing to spend engineering resources on integration.

But a closer examination reveals why this gold rush may be turning into a money pit.

Integration Methods and Their Hidden Trade-offs

Platforms pursuing Hyperliquid integration face a critical technical decision: how to connect to the infrastructure. Each approach comes with distinct advantages and disadvantages in terms of retained profit.

Open API Integration: Fast But Fragile

MetaMask, Rabby, and Axiom opted for direct API integration—the quickest path to market. This approach offers rapid deployment, minimal infrastructure investment, and streamlined data flows with low latency. The frontend directly connects to Hyperliquid’s official API, which MetaMask even open-sourced.

However, the retained profit advantages here are offset by significant disadvantages. Rate limiting becomes a major bottleneck during high trading activity. While individual users experience minor delays, platform-level rate limiting can degrade the experience for thousands of concurrent users. Additionally, platforms have zero control over Hyperliquid’s updates. When the official API changes or experiences downtime, integrated platforms suffer alongside them—and face user complaints despite having no direct control over the source of the problem.

Read-only Nodes: Better UX, Higher Costs

Phantom took a different route, deploying read-only nodes to reduce reliance on rate-limited APIs. This approach theoretically provides superior user experience and better control over service quality.

Yet the disadvantages are substantial. Hyperliquid’s dual-chain architecture generates over 1 terabyte of data every 2 days. Without archiving, storage costs alone become economically unsustainable. More critically, this half-open approach introduces a consistency problem: data from read-only nodes may lag behind official API data. A user might place a market order based on stale candlestick data from the read-only node, only to execute at an unintended price when the official API processes the order. Phantom faces an uncomfortable question: who bears the cost of compensation when data inconsistency harms users?

These technical choices directly impact the retained profit calculation. Phantom’s superior UX comes at a dramatically higher operational cost, while the API approach sacrifices reliability for speed.

The Uncomfortable Truth: User Base vs. Revenue Reality

Despite industry-wide integration efforts, actual user adoption remains surprisingly modest. Integrated platforms report only a few thousand daily active users for perpetual trading, totaling far less than 10,000-20,000 across all platforms combined.

This number becomes even more concerning when examined against Hyperliquid’s user structure. The platform’s 1.1 million total addresses include 217,000 monthly active users, but the wealth distribution resembles an inverted pyramid:

• The top 5% of users generate over 90% of trading volume
• The top 0.23% (roughly 500 ultra-high-net-worth traders with $1M+ positions) control 70% of open interest ($5.4 billion total)
• The top 100 traders maintain average positions of $33 million each
• The bottom 150,000 users (72.77% of the base) contribute just 0.2% of volume, with average holdings around $75

This structure creates a fundamental disadvantage for third-party integrations. Professional traders and high-net-worth individuals—the only users generating material trading volume—overwhelmingly prefer the official Hyperliquid interface for its full feature set. They have no loyalty to wallet platforms; they migrate wherever the best tools reside.

Meanwhile, retail users joining through wallet integrations contribute negligible trading volume and minimal commissions.

The Retained Profit Problem: Advantages Dissolve Into Disadvantages

When platforms seriously model the economics, the retained profit picture darkens considerably.

The Cost Side

Integration demands ongoing engineering resources. Read-only node operators must manage storage, handle intermittent data inconsistencies, and maintain 24/7 operational reliability. API integrations require continuous monitoring for rate limiting issues and API changes. Both approaches necessitate customer support teams to handle confusion and complaints when users encounter friction.

The cumulative operational expense for most platforms likely exceeds $100,000-$500,000 annually, depending on user scale and integration depth.

The Revenue Side

Commission earnings from the builder fee represent the primary revenue source. With only thousands of daily active users and a user base dominated by low-volume retail traders, actual commission income remains modest. Even Phantom—which invested significantly in read-only node infrastructure and captured the largest share—reportedly generates returns that barely justify operational costs.

Several platforms have quietly reduced or deprioritized their Hyperliquid integrations, realizing that retained profit turns negative when accounting for total system costs.

The Opportunity Cost

Developing and maintaining perpetual trading integrations consumes engineering capacity that could be directed toward differentiating features, improved security, or core product enhancements. For most wallets, this represents a net loss of value creation.

Case Studies in Realistic Outcomes

Different platforms have pursued varying strategies, revealing distinct outcomes:

MetaMask delivered rapid integration through open-sourced code and API connections. Speed was achieved, but profitability remains elusive. The platform essentially provided its enormous user base for free while the platform absorbs rate-limiting complaints.

Phantom built the most sophisticated integration, deploying read-only nodes to ensure smooth mobile experiences. This generated the highest commission rebates but also the highest costs. Only Phantom’s management knows the true ROI, but the silence suggests profitability remains uncertain.

Trade.xyz rejected direct competition with Hyperliquid itself and instead developed perpetual trading on RWA assets (real-world assets like US stocks and gold). It has accumulated $19.1 billion in perpetual trading volume ($320 million weekly average), demonstrating that differentiation—not aggregation—creates lasting advantage.

BasedApp pursued a hybrid approach with both web and mobile entry points, attempting to capture both professional and retail traders. However, it remains constrained by the ceiling imposed by the official Hyperliquid web interface, which professionals inherently prefer.

The pattern is clear: retained profit advantages accrue only to platforms that differentiate beyond simple integration.

Why Advanced Features Still Don’t Solve the Problem

Some platforms attempted to differentiate by adding features that the official interface lacks: advanced charting, automated trading, AI-assisted position management, or multi-PerpDex aggregation.

These capabilities theoretically appeal to traders who value convenience. Yet several barriers persist:

• User switching remains costless: Even traders comfortable with wallet-based interfaces will migrate to Hyperliquid’s native app (launching in 2025) when seeking advanced features
• AI trading accuracy issues: Autonomous trading systems suffer from high loss rates, making users reluctant to deploy capital through these mechanisms
• Multi-PerpDex complexity: Managing reserves and ensuring consistency across multiple perpetual DEXs (Hyperliquid, Aster, Lighter) introduces additional technical risk

Advanced features delay the problem; they don’t solve it.

The Path Forward: Realistic Retention Strategies

Honest platforms are now pursuing three realistic paths to sustainable retained profit:

1. Self-Developed Perpetual Infrastructure

Rather than integrate third-party solutions, some platforms are building proprietary perpetual trading engines. This eliminates rate-limiting issues, data consistency problems, and dependency on external platforms. However, it requires substantial engineering investment and liquidity provision.

2. Niche Complementation

Trade.xyz’s success with RWA perpetuals demonstrates that differentiated markets can generate genuine user loyalty. Platforms are exploring:

• AI-assisted trading (with better risk management)
• Perpetual trading on non-standard assets
• Cross-chain perpetual solutions
• Social trading or copy-trading features

3. User Acquisition Outside CEX Ecosystems

Rather than competing for existing perpetual traders, some platforms focus on converting non-crypto users or CEX users unfamiliar with on-chain perpetuals. This demands educational content, simplified interfaces, and long-term user retention strategies—but offers access to genuinely new users.

The Verdict on Retained Profit Advantages and Disadvantages

For the vast majority of platforms, integrating third-party perpetuals like Hyperliquid represents a low-retained-profit business. The disadvantages—high operational costs, minimal user acquisition, negligible commission income, opportunity cost of engineering resources—substantially outweigh the advantages of rapid market entry and builder fee participation.

Platforms that pursued integration primarily for competitive positioning (“everyone else is doing it”) are now quietly evaluating exit strategies or deprioritization. Those reporting success have either built differentiated experiences that reduce their dependence on volume, or they’ve accepted that integration serves ecosystem completeness rather than profitability.

The wallet wars won’t be won through Hyperliquid aggregation. They’ll be decided by platforms that solve genuinely new problems—whether that’s better RWA perpetuals, superior AI trading, multi-chain perpetuals, or entirely new categories of on-chain derivatives.

Until then, most integrations represent a form of strategic necessity wearing the mask of business opportunity. The retained profit calculation, once honestly performed, reveals that participation in Hyperliquid integration may signal less about market insight and more about competitive anxiety.

The real opportunity lies not in better integration, but in better differentiation.