Hyperliquid TWAP orders: how they work and how to track whale TWAPs
A TWAP (time-weighted average price) order buys or sells a large amount gradually instead of all at once. On Hyperliquid it is a built-in order type, and like everything on the exchange it is public: anyone can see that an address is running a TWAP, how large it is and how long it will take. The TWAP page shows every active TWAP of $100K+ right now.
How a TWAP executes on Hyperliquid
- The trader sets the coin, direction, total size and duration — from a few minutes to several days.
- Hyperliquid splits the order into slices and sends one every 30 seconds. Each slice is a small market order with limited slippage, so it does not walk deep into the order book.
- If a slice cannot fill (the book is too thin), the missed part is added to the following slices, so the TWAP catches up with its schedule.
- Options: randomized slice timing, so the pattern is harder to spot, and reduce-only — the TWAP can only reduce or close a position, not open a new one.
- The trader can cancel a TWAP at any moment.
Why TWAP orders matter
A large market order tells you what has already happened. A TWAP tells you what is going to happen: a $5M TWAP over 24 hours means about $3.5K of market buying or selling every minute, all day. For a coin that trades little, that is steady pressure the price has to absorb. That is why HyperScan shows not only the size of each TWAP, but how much it still has left to execute, and sums it up by coin as net TWAP pressure.
Size relative to the coin matters more than the dollar amount. The same $1M is noise for BTC and a lot for a coin with $20M of daily volume, so every TWAP is shown as a share of the coin’s 24h volume.
How HyperScan tracks TWAPs
We read the stream of all trades on Hyperliquid. TWAP slices are marked in it and carry the address of their owner. When an address starts executing slices, we read its TWAP from the public Hyperliquid API: full size, duration and the reduce-only flag. Progress is counted from the slices we see; when a TWAP ends, the exact executed amount and the result — completed or cancelled — come from Hyperliquid. Finished TWAPs stay on the page for 24 hours.
How to read the TWAP page
- Left to buy / left to sell — what active TWAPs will still execute; their difference is the net pressure.
- % of 24h volume — how big the TWAP is for this coin.
- ×2, ×10 — one trader often splits a large order into several identical TWAPs; they are shown as one row with the totals.
- Reduce-only — the TWAP closes a position: such a sell is usually profit-taking on a long, not a bet on a fall. The trader’s positions are on their page.
- Cancelled TWAPs among the finished ones — a change of plans is information too.
Alerts
A new TWAP of $100K+ that equals 1.5%+ of the coin’s daily volume, or any TWAP of $5M+, appears on the notifications page and as a marker on the coin’s price chart. Several TWAPs one trader starts in the same coin and direction count together. The same alerts can come to Telegram — free, like everything on HyperScan.
Limitations
- Only perpetual markets are covered; spot TWAPs (including spot HYPE) are not shown yet.
- Between start and end, progress is our estimate from the slices; the exact figure arrives when the TWAP ends.
- A TWAP can be cancelled at any moment, so it is a plan, not a promise. Nothing here is investment advice.