Liquidity and size
Hyperliquid is the bigger exchange: $4.17B traded in the last 24 hours against $1.33B on Lighter (3.1×), and $14.71B of open interest against $525.13M (28×). More open interest means deeper order books and less slippage for large orders.
Lighter lists 213 markets, including 90 stocks, indices, commodities and currency pairs. Hyperliquid has 293 markets, of them 115 on the xyz exchange (HIP-3) with stocks and commodities.
Fees
Lighter Standard accounts pay no trading fees at all; the trade-off is a 300 ms delay on market orders. Premium accounts get fast execution for 0.028% taker and 0.004% maker.
Hyperliquid charges 0.045% for market and 0.015% for limit orders at the base tier, falling with 14-day volume and HYPE staking. For active traders the difference in fees can matter more than the difference in funding.
Funding and leverage
Both exchanges pay funding every hour with the same baseline of 0.00125% per hour. Hyperliquid allows funding up to 4% per hour, Lighter caps it at 0.5% — extreme rates on Lighter stay much lower. Maximum leverage on BTC: 40x on Hyperliquid, 50x on Lighter.
For the 163 coins listed on both, rates often differ: when one exchange pays much more, traders short there and long on the other to collect the spread.
HLP and LLP
Both exchanges have a community pool that makes markets and takes over liquidations: HLP on Hyperliquid holds $177.57M (APR 3.5%), LLP on Lighter holds $93.09M (APY 14.9%). Depositors share the pool’s profits and losses.
Whales
HyperScan tracks 253 whales on Hyperliquid and 147 on Lighter: wallets with $10M+ in positions on Hyperliquid and $1M+ on Lighter, which is a smaller exchange. Both exchanges are fully on-chain, so every position, liquidation and large order is public.
Hyperliquid whales · Lighter whales · HLP · LLP · Calculators